of liberty for all.

Rawls uses the device of the Veil of Ignorance to argue that this principle is the most effective way of combining liberty with justice. If you did not know what position you would occupy in a society, you would want this society to include the greatest amount of individual liberty that could possibly be extended to everyone. This is because there is no possibility of complete liberty within a society unless it is unjust, since it would include the liberty to oppress others for those who were able to exercise it. If you are free to play your music at maximum volume at three o'clock in the morning, your neighbor is not free to sleep. Some individual liberties must therefore be curtailed for the general benefit of all citizens.

Some liberties can be classified as absolute under Rawls's principle, and these qualify as rights: the right to vote and the right to own property, for instance. Other freedoms extend to a certain point, which is as far as they can go without intruding upon, and thereby curtailing, the liberty of another.

A really important aspect of Rawl's theory of justice is that decisions on the distribution of resources should be from the perspective of "not knowing" what your own position in life is. In other words, if you are making decisions based upon your own needs and what you anticipate your own needs will be, that is not a just decision.  There is a kind of "You never know" element to Rawlsian justice.  You might be in need down the road yourself. If you decide to deprive others because you do not have a particular need, you are not operating in a just way for all of society.  It is more just to say that in spite of your not needing help, for example, healthcare, you can see that there could come a time in anyone's life that he or she would, so your decision should reflect that.  If your choices are all about you and your needs, first, this is unjust to everyone, and second, you may find yourself at the mercy of others someday, others who are making decisions based on their own needs, in which case you will be complaining of the injustice.  To me, this is the most compelling aspect of Rawl's theory. 

To put it simply, philosopher John Rawls defined justice as "fairness." By this, he meant that the basic structures of society should be ordered in such a way that they promote maximum both egalitarian freedom and equality. In doing so, he attempts to transcend the traditional dichotomy between socialists, who restrict freedoms to promote equality, and conservatives, who promote freedoms but allow the proliferation of inequality.

According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Rawls' concept of fairness as justice exhibits two main principles.

First Principle: Each person has the same indefeasible claim to a fully adequate scheme of equal basic liberties, which scheme is compatible with the same scheme of liberties for all;

Second Principle: Social and economic inequalities are to satisfy two conditions: 

1. They are to be attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity;
2. They are to be to the greatest benefit of the least-advantaged members of society.

In other words, Rawls acknowledges economic and other forms of inequality will exist in an egalitarian society, but he argues that society should be so structured as to provide equality of both liberties and opportunity. Consequently, he viewed a society as just to the extent it provided a fair playing field for its citizens.

John Rawls argues that defining justice as fairness is the best way to deal with the concept of justice in a liberal society.

Rawls begins by pointing out that, for a government, "legitimacy" is a floor, not a ceiling. A government has to be legitimate at a bare minimum. Justice, by contrast, is a ceiling, or a maximum goal to reach for. Not all legitimate governments are just.

For most of US history (and the history of other Western liberal democracies), the utilitarian idea of "the most good for the most people" was often used to define "justice." An action was "just" if it provided the most good to the largest number.

Rawls, however, argues that the utilitarian idea of justice fails to do several important things—like help us resolve the tension between freedom and equality. If we see justice as a sort of fundamental fairness, however, we can use the concept of justice to resolve that tension between freedom and equality.

School segregation by race is one example. Under a utilitarian model, sending racial minorities to inferior schools might look like justice. One could argue that it makes the majority happy and still gives the minority an education (of a sort), so segregation does the most good for the most people and is therefore just, even though it is not equal and makes both segregated groups less free (because they can't choose which schools to attend).

Under Rawls's conception of justice as fairness, however, we wouldn't ask if the most people were happy under school segregation. Instead, we'd ask, "Is school segregation fair?" Is it fair to the kids who get stuck in the inferior schools? Is it fair to the kids in the better schools who never get to hear the perspectives of the minority students, or make friends with them, or benefit from the work they could achieve if they had more resources? Here, allowing school integration would seem to be more equal and also more free, which Rawls would argue is more appropriate in a liberal democracy.

Generally, a work can be called important if it continues to have an impact on the world long after its initial publication. John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice was published in 1971. Around forty years later, the ideas that Rawls relates in his book continue to be employed to understand and examine society.

One idea that remains important is Rawls’s “conception of reciprocity.” For Rawls, this concept refers to the ideal design of society. If a person “can accept the basic structure as designed to advance his interests,” then it becomes a much easier task to justify the “social order” to everyone.

Some current thinkers have used Rawls’s ideas about reciprocity to diagnose the recent tumult in the United States. They attribute the unrest and conflagrations to the lack of reciprocity. Whether it’s Black Lives Matter protesters or Donald Trump supporters, scholars can utilize Rawls to show that people aren’t accepting “the basic structure” (in fact, in some cases, they’re violently opposing it) because there’s no reciprocity: it’s not advancing their interests.

When it comes to current debates about economics in the United States, Rawls also continues to play an important role. Writers can point to Rawls in order to advance the discussion around economic inequality. Through Rawls, pundits can make the important argument that what’s needed isn’t economic equality, but equal economic opportunity.

Of course, one doesn’t have to agree with Rawls’s theories or with how current writers implement them. Nevertheless, the ongoing relevance of his book reflects its continued importance.

In Theory of Justice, Rawls sets out to describe social justice from within a liberal democratic society. The entire work is about reconciling a concern for egalitarianism with a concern for individual liberty. Many libertarian works, starting with those by John Locke, that place great emphasis on individual liberty, do so at the cost of equality. Conversely, works of radical egalitarianism—Karl Marx's Capital, for example—describe a society that is egalitarian but not one that respects individual liberty. Rawls attempts to synthesize the two different ways of thinking about social justice by illustrating the compatibility of liberty and equality; this, in many ways, is what makes Theory of Justice so important and influential.

His thought experiment with the veil of ignorance illustrates how the two are compatible. In this we are asked to imagine that we make laws and policies from behind a 'veil of ignorance'; we are ignorant of things like our socioeconomic status. As a result, we will make laws that benefit the worst off (the Maximin principle) and that are not only to the advantage of a small group. In this way, we attain equality. At the same time, once these laws and policies are set in place, there is minimal regulation in the state, allowing for individual liberty. The structures are such that equality is to be maximized, but once the structure is in place, there will be minimal intervention. The reflective equilibrium will be all that is needed.