John Rawls and the Social Minimum

Abstract

ABSTRACT Welfare states are often urged to secure a social minimum for citizens—a level of material well-being beneath which no-one should be permitted to fall. This paper examines the justification for such a claim. It begins by criticising John Rawls's rejection of the social minimum approach to justice in A Theory of Justice: the argument Rawls uses to justify the Difference Principle, based on what he calls ‘the strains of commitment’ in the ‘original position’, actually provides a better justification for a social minimum principle. The paper then examines the substance of that argument outside the context of Rawls's contractarianism, showing that there is a general case for seeing to it that desperate need does not go unmet in a liberal society.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 313 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.