PHIL103: Moral and Political Philosophy

Watch this lecture until 24:35. As you watch, consider what a genuinely fair society would look like. One plausible answer is that it would be a society in which everyone had an equal opportunity to succeed. Societies in which success is a function of each individual's abilities, or meritocracies, gives an unfair advantage to those who are born into positions of privilege or greater natural ability. According to Rawls, the technique of reasoning from the original position demonstrates that social benefits will always need to be redistributed in order to benefit the least well-off.