211 - Stability

Summary

Rawls consistently maintains that a theory of justice must be shown to be stable. Rawls famously declares that justice is “the first virtue of social institutions” (TJ 3). But after explaining that the goal of his work is to vindicate this conviction by showing that there can be a set of just principles that could regulate the actions and institutions of a well-ordered society, Rawls goes on to note that such a conception of justice is “not the only prerequisite for a viable human community. There are other fundamental social problems, in particular those of coordination, efficiency, and stability” (TJ 5). Of these three, stability poses the most challenging problem for Rawls’s theory of justice.

“It is evident,” continues Rawls, “that these three problems are connected with that of justice.” But Rawls’s two principles of justice address the first two problems directly, by explaining how the goals of coordination and efficiency are to be made consistent with the priority of justice. According to the first principle, individuals can justly coordinate their plans of action by recognizing a scheme of equal basic liberties which allow each person to pursue a conception of the good. According to the second principle, a society can justly pursue efficiency by permitting a scheme of competitive economic incentives, and their resulting inequalities, only to the extent that this scheme improves the situation of the worst off. But nothing in the two principles shows that Rawls’s proposed scheme of social cooperation must be stable – which for Rawls means that the scheme “must be more or less regularly complied with and its basic rules willingly acted upon; and when infractions occur, stabilizing forces should exist that prevent further violations and tend to restore the arrangement” (TJ 6).