John Rawls Philosophy

I will talk about John Rawls’ philosophy and two major critiques made to his work by G.A. Cohen
John Rawls was born in Baltimore in 1921. He was always concerned about poverty in the United States and wanted to change the society he lived in. He wrote his most famous book A Theory of Justice in 1971. This book is considered the most important book in American philosophy after the World War II.
John Rawls philosophy is based on his vision of justice. In his book A Theory of Justice he explained his idea of “Original position”, in which every person must know what features about justice and fairness are relevant and which ones are not in order to have a proper critique to a society.
Theory of justice is an essay that begins with the assumption

Ignoring all these details about our social status, probably nobody would take the risk. knowing they live in an unfair society, as Rawls thought the United States was. If we knew nothing about where we end up, which kind of society would we think as fair to be born

Rawls gave as an answer to the experiment anyway. He thought every sane person would choose a society with some basic social covered aspects, such as good education, great healthcare, a fair access to justice and a good housing for everyone. This raises another dilemma. People usually know which kind of society they want or they find fair, they just do not know how to achieve it or they just do not question about it because the choices were already made for them. But the main conclusion of the Veil of Ignorance is that if we had to play a lottery, we would create the fairest and most just society we could achieve.
In this kind of fair society, decisions and social acts will be made without bias or predisposed advantage of a group of people against others.
Rawls’ experiment makes us think deeper and objectively which kind of society we would think just. When a political decision is made, we should try to use the veil of ignorance in order to see how fair this measure