John Rawls's theory of justice tries to resolve the question of fair allocation: When, if ever, may some members of society claim rightful privilege over their fellows? Rawls's answer is maximin justice: inequalities are just if, by permitting them, society treats best those whom she treats worst. Rawls attempts to show that this rule binds us all under the terms of a social contract. The present paper tries to show that Rawls's theory will not stand scrutiny. The social contract, as he gives it, disfranchises all but a single social stratum: Why are others bound by it? The maximin principle, allegedly agreed to under this social contract, requires that we judge allocations by ignoring all but one of society's many strata. This leads in turn to arbitrary judgments including ones which at once increase inequality and decrease the total shared by society. An alternative argument is offered, beginning with a social contract requiring agreement on all inequalities among agents for a series of hypothetical social strata. This device is meant to bind all strata, and leads to a principle of general advantage: Inequalities are just if but only if they serve the advantage of some strata and the disadvantage of none. This seemingly paradoxical rule has a clear interpretation and avoids the main difficulties attributed to maximin justice. Like maximin, however, the new doctrine would evidently require a radical redistribution of income in a society like our own.

A critical review essay of A Theory of Justice by John Rawls, focusing on his attempt to ground radical egalitarian democracy on a social contract. Rawls tries to construct a new theory of justice with the help of the old state of nature theorists. The reviewer investigates whether this effort is successful and whether Rawls possesses an adequate understanding of the philosophers from whom he draws his inspiration.

The intention of this essay is to raise certain questions about A Theory of Justice in Rawls's own terms—accepting his premises but examining his reasoning by his own stated criteria. I believe that such an examination will show that the abstract justificatory appeal to an “original position” is unsatisfactory in certain vital psychological and philosophical ways; that the Rawlsian analysis raises problems of comparison and measurement not adequately disposed of by the doctrine of justice as fairness and its corollary strategy of “maximin”; and that the appeal to congruence on which the latter part of Rawls's argument depends is founded on an inadequate political and historical sociology—which in turn creates further problems for the argument from the original position. In sum, I wish to show that while Rawls has lit his candle at both ends, he has got neither end to burn.

After a brief review of the debate that surrounds B. F. Skinner's social and political thought, this essay argues that, even if Skinner's behaviorism is accepted as valid, nonetheless his social and political thought is inadequate and self-contradictory. Skinner's treatment of social organization (or ’sociological problems”) contains two serious, perhaps insoluble, technical difficulties. His treatment of values (or “philosophical problems”) is fraught with contradiction, because he cannot meld what is valued with what leads to survival, because his planners can easily misperceive the objective world, and because he cannot justify cultural survival as the ultimate value. On “political problems,” Skinner is vague and incomplete; he proposes no effective means of “countercontrol”; and his behaviorism does not contain within itself the imperative to any particular type of political system. Because Skinner's social and political thought fails at crucial points, all the problems that Skinner tried to close must be kept open and—whatever may be the technical successes and failures of behaviorism—the answers to some fundamental issues of human life must be sought beyond behaviorism.

Humanist critiques of B. F. Skinner have made valuable contributions to our understanding of his thought, but more attention needs to be paid to his work as potential empirical theory. To evaluate the theoretical merits of Skinner's approach, this paper examines his methodological postulates, his implicit epistemology, and some underlying normative assumptions. It is argued that Skinnerian behaviorism commits a serious error in allowing a methodological presupposition (reduction of the subject matter to observable behavior of the organism) to become a de facto ontology that prematurely forecloses the incorporation of potentially valuable hypothetical constructs at the level of social theory. This theoretical difficulty is critical because the inherent safeguards of science that Skinner proposes as a humane safeguard against misuse would be unlikely to apply to an actual technology of behavior control as employed by political and administrative authorities.