When considering the institutions and policies of a society that would realize Rawls’s principles of social justice, it is clear that the tax system would be an important part of a just basic structure (see e.g. TJ 234–235). However, despite the centrality of a system of taxation to the realization of justice in practice, Rawls does not give us a systematic account of the nature of taxation in a just society. Instead, his remarks on the subject are somewhat fragmentary, “illustrative and highly tentative” (JF 136), leaving us with a sketch that would need to have its details completed in practice through democratic deliberation at the legislative stage.

Rawls’s clearest and least tentative remarks about taxation consist in his avowed aim of using the tax system to realize “the idea of regulating bequest and restricting inheritance” (JF 161), in connection with realizing fair equality of opportunity. Following the suggested forms of taxation described by James Meade in his description of a property-owning democracy (Meade 1964), Rawls endorses a highly progressive, recipient-oriented (rather than estate-oriented) form of taxation on bequests and capital transfers, “whereby the principle of progressive taxation is applied at the receiver’s end,” covering both cases of inheritance and gifts inter vivos (TJ 245; JF 161). Surprisingly, Rawls sees the aim of progressive taxation not as encompassing the goal of raising funds for the provision of public goods, “but solely to prevent concentrations of wealth that are considered inimical to background justice” (JF 161); in terms of the distinction made by Murphy and Nagel (2002, chapter 4), Rawls targets progressive taxation at the job of redistribution, and not as a way of funding public provision of services.