John Rawls Pursuit Of Inequality

Foremost, it is at first necessary to define what is truly meant by inequality; John Rawls argues that, for one to live within an ultimately equal society, one would have to be able to embrace the veil of ignorance and have no fear of risk in being randomly placed within society at birth. Thus, for one, inequality may be the failure of equality of outcome – that is, equity – as indeed for an equal society to exist in reality one would need to devise a form of communism, although it is manifest that this has succumbed to ruin. Veritably, 'the greatest inequality is in making the unequal equal. ' Moreover, this model does not equate to justice, as this places no value on merit or social mobility, nor does it factor in the extreme authoritarianism

Indeed, although many of the Liberal reforms were wholly inadequate, this set a precedent and has since evolved into the National Health Service and the veritable welfare state. These services can be reliably utilised by the entire population regardless of income; thus British society is more just than earlier in history, not only within its structures but also within its mindset of what is needed within a functioning society. It was only at the turn of the 20th century that the population was beginning to abandon the idea that poverty was self-inflicted, evidenced by the surveys by Seebohm Rowntree and Charles Booth in York and London respectively. This trend is manifest across the globe, with Germany, the Netherlands and France having similar systems. Thus, society has become more just, as safety net systems have been developed. However, this impetus towards equality in modern history only focuses on the internal equality of selected economically developed countries, and ignores the international

Indisputably, a great number of high income countries are in this position because of MNCs, which have existed since the 17th century; a 2017 report shows that eight people, all of whom are founders or CEOs of MNCs, own the same amount of wealth as the bottom half of the global population, and are mostly from countries of high development. Indeed, a country must be moderately well developed economically to create the safety net needed to form a just society. Verily, this expresses a vast amount of inequality within the global economic system, as to imagine that this wealth difference is just is absurd; one must question how it is possible for eight people to collectively hold as much merit as 3.6 billion people. In comparison, in 2014 the 85 richest people held the same amount of wealth as the bottom half of the population; therefore it is manifest that inequality is a dominant trend. Furthermore, this injustice rings greater when one considers that, for a majority of vastly successful MNCs, this amount of wealth has been created partly due to the labour of those 3.6 billion people, 1.6 billion of whom are in absolute poverty. One must question how it is just for a select few to massively benefit from an