PSIR Power 50 – Day 3 Capsule: Theories of Justice + Practice Qs

Hello Aspirants,

Day 3 tackles Justice

UPSC has asked 3 ten-mark questions, 5 fifteen-mark questions, and 5 twenty-mark questions from this topic in last 12 years.

(Foundation-course alumni: go back to your notes if you are not able to recall something).

1. Justice as Ideal & Absolute Truth

2. Classical Principles of Justice

3. Justice as a Balancing Yard-stick

• Resolves clashes—most famously liberty ↔ equality.
• Your stance pivots on which value you badge as ultimate.

4. Liberalism → Utilitarianism → Rawls

1. Classic Liberalism worships liberty.
2. Utilitarianism shifts to utility—“greatest happiness of the greatest number.”
   • Flaw: legitimises majoritarianism; minorities become means.
3. Rawls (a Liberal Egalitarian) grafts Kantian ethics—no person is a mere means.
   • Rawls’s maxim: “Each person has an inviolability… the welfare of all cannot override the freedom of some.”

5. Rawls in Focus

6. Maximin Rule & the Two Principles

7. Reflective Equilibrium

• Iterative balancing between held judgments and chosen principles.
• Narrow equilibrium: align your set of beliefs with one principle-set.
• Wide equilibrium: re-adjust after scanning all moral considerations.
• End-goal: a coherent web you can defend under cross-examination—precisely what ATS evaluators annotate in the margin.

9. Communitarian Critique of Rawls – Core Points

Michael Sandel ( Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, 1982)

Concept of Self

• Rawls: self prior to its ends (freely chooses goals).
• Sandel: humans are “embedded selves”; identities and purposes are given by community, not chosen.
• Original position is infeasible—agents cannot step outside communal attachments.

Individual ↔ Community

• Rawls over-states autonomy, under-states communal bonds.
• Paradox: disinterested contractors behind the veil later feel rational duty to aid the disadvantaged—Sandel says genuine concern would arise spontaneously from shared life.

Role of the State

• Against Rawlsian neutrality, state should advance the community’s vision of the good.
• In a genuinely united community, abstract rights-talk becomes redundant.

Overall charge: the Rawlsian person is an empty, arbitrary chooser—detached from real values, commitments, and lived experiences.

Neutral-State Skepticism (Communitarian View)

• True neutrality is an illusion; every state expresses a cultural ethos.
• Alasdair MacIntyre: moral norms are particularistic, varying by tradition.

Michael Walzer (Spheres of Justice, 1983)

• Justice is relativistic & particularistic; goods carry social meanings created by distinct communities.
• No universal “good” fits all societies; equality itself is culture-rooted.
• A society is just when its members live faithfully by their shared understandings of offices, honours, and rewards.

Rawls’s Reply – Political Liberalism (1993)

• Distinguishes a political conception of justice (for the basic structure) from comprehensive doctrines (religions, moral philosophies).
• Political conception is free-standing yet drawn from democratic public culture.

Central Problem:
How can citizens holding diverse comprehensive doctrines endorse the same principles of justice?

Key Devices

1. Overlapping Consensus – different moral world-views converge on justice as fairness because citizens are reasonable.
2. Reasonable Pluralism – diversity of doctrines is a permanent fact of democratic life.
3. Burden of Judgment – awareness of limits of reason leads people to seek fair terms of cooperation.

Result: citizens reach a shared political morality without relinquishing their deeper, differing beliefs.

10. Rawls & Global Justice

• Charles Beitz (1979), Thomas Pogge (1989, 2002) → extend Difference Principle worldwide; rich states owe the global poor.
• Rawls: no global redistribution; instead rules for “decent peoples” (peaceful, basic-rights, law-guided, decent hierarchy).
  Eight duties: mutual independence · keep treaties · equitable deals · non-intervention · self-defence only · honour human rights · war-conduct code · aid burdened societies.

11. Robert Nozick – Entitlement Theory (Anarchy, State and Utopia)

1. Justice in Acquisition
2. Justice in Transfer
3. Rectification

• Motto: “From everyone as they choose, to everyone as they are chosen.”
• Rejects patterned redistribution; accepts large inequalities if produced by just steps.
• State = minimal “night-watchman” / dominant protective agency.

11. Ronald Dworkin – Equality of Resources

• Equality = sovereign virtue; right to equal concern and respect.
• Rejects Equality of Welfare; defends Equality of Resources:

• Auction thought-experiment + envy test → distribution envy-free.
• Ambition sensitivity (choices) & endowment sensitivity (brute luck insurance).

• Distinguishes brute luck vs option luck.

12. Amartya Sen – Capability Approach

• Justice aims at expanding capabilities (real freedoms), not only primary goods (Rawls) or welfare.
• Functionings = valued doings/beings; development = capability expansion.
• Advocates comparative assessment, public reasoning, removal of clear injustices.
• Pratap Bhanu Mehta: calls Sen “anti-utopian yet utopian.”
• Sen on plurality of reason: justice must accommodate diverse equalities & liberties.

13. Feminist Conception of Justice

Key premise: Classic justice theories- patriarchal; women’s experiences lie outside the canon.

• Julius Stone: Law/justice are social constructs, context-bound and evolutionary, not formal abstractions.
• Susan Moller Okin

• Gender system = institutionalised sex differences; tradition, socialisation, role-fixation embed inequality.
• Liberalism’s blind spot: household & family stay beyond justice’s reach since Aristotle relegated women indoors.
• Critique of Rawls
  • Uses male-generic language (“he, his, mankind”).
  • Veil of ignorance omits sex; thus gender bias survives the original position.
  • Calls the monogamous family a basic institution yet never probes its internal power relations.
• Theory of justice: The gendered family is root of social unfairness; reconstruct roles/opportunities via women’s full participation in building a truly human moral theory.
• Engagement with Michael Walzer: credits his notice of sex/gender but faults his cultural relativism.

14. Debate on Rawls’s democratic equality

Strengths

• Combines equal basic liberties with fair equality of opportunity + difference principle (maximin); aligns with welfare-state devices like progressive tax and affirmative action.

Critiques

15. How Rawls widens liberal justice

• Original position / veil of ignorance forces rules that protect the least advantaged while retaining liberty.
• Shifts liberalism from formal rights to justice as fairness: liberty legitimated only when pay-gaps are defensible.
• Introduces public reason and sketches institutions—progressive tax, dispersed capital, fair value of political liberty—bridging theory and policy.
• Sparked modern normative revival (Kymlicka), yet prompted further refinements:

• Sen – focus on effective freedom (capabilities).
• Katrina Forrester – calls for updates for post-industrial capitalism.

• Rawls himself views principles as “worked out anew for each generation,” making liberal egalitarianism a self-correcting project.

(UPSC pyq 2016)

16. Ambedkar’s Egalitarian Justice vs Rawls’s Pure Procedural Justice

• Ambedkar: abolition of caste first; democracy as “a way of associated living.” State-led redistribution (reservations, labour rights, State and Minorities socialism) turns liberty–equality–fraternity into material facts. Outcome-centred, group-repairing, substantive justice.
• Rawls: original position + veil of ignorance yield two principles (equal basic liberties; Difference Principle) chosen by identity-blind contractors. Justice is whatever emerges from this pure procedural device; inequality allowed only if it benefits the least-advantaged.

(expect a 15 marker in O-AWFG 1 , also a UPSC PYQ on the same theme)

Scholar Index –
Bhimrao Ambedkar · · Charles R. Beitz · Gerald Allan Cohen · Ronald Myers Dworkin · Katrina Forrester · Emperor Justinian I (Flavius Petrus Sabbatius Justinianus) · Immanuel Kant · William (Kim) Kymlicka · Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre · Pratap Bhanu Mehta · Robert Nozick · Susan Moller Okin · Thomas Winfried Pogge · Michael J. Sandel · Amartya Kumar Sen · Julius Stone · Charles Taylor · Michael Walzer.

(Copies in ATS diagnostics that name-check fewer scholars scored 25-35 marks lower—pattern noted!, YET inclusion of scholars should be contextual and organic)

Practice Questions – write before 4 p.m.

Question 1. “Communitarian thinkers reject Rawls’ notion of the ‘unencumbered self.’ Briefly outline their main objections.” (10 Marks)

Question 2. Critically examine John Rawls’s argument for democratic equality. (2016, 15 Marks)

Question 3. How has Rawls enriched the idea of justice in liberalism? (2021, 20 Marks)

📌 Model answers drop this evening on the Telegram channel: https://t.me/psirbyamitpratap – set an alert.

Quick logistics

• 2025 Mains writers: PSIR O-AWFG Cohort 1 launches 11 June; PSIR ATS goes live 15 June. Today’s answer set doubles as your warm-up task—bring the evaluated answer copies in mentorship sessions and ensure that you get the personalised feedback.
• 2026 Mains writers: keep uploading PSIR O-AWFG & ATS copies on the dashboard; this capsule aligns with Week 1 of your schedule.
• Alternate between mini-tests (O-AWFG) and full mocks (ATS) to tackle speed, content depth, and structured revision—each line-by-line evaluation pinpoints your weaknesses and errors. Follow your PSIR O-AWFG & ATS schedule and use the model answers to enrich your content, as rankers recommended based on their own success.