Rawslian theory is a justified form of government.

Thanks for a great debate, Skeptic. I had fun and hope to debate you again in the future, and hope you feel the same way. First, Pro has again ignored my first argument. To restate it: Rawls assumes that the people in the OP are not simply choosing between systems of governance (say, democracy vs monarchy vs anarchy). The society he says people will choose isn’t simply ‘a democracy’—it is a democratic society populated by people who choose to implement a large welfare state. But if we have the luxury of choosing what sort of people are society is populated by in the OP, why not choose an anarchic society populated by really nice people who give a lot to charity? And, if the theory is modified so that we don’t have that luxury, and are only choosing between different systems, rather than sets of specific policies under those systems, then Rawls and Pro give us no reasons to choose a society with a government over a society without one. Universal consent: Simply defining the people in the OP as agreeing with each other is nonsense. People value different things differently—risk aversion, for example. If no valuation of, say, risk aversion is more rational than any other, then policies that are different because of the value they place on risk aversion can’t be more or less rational then each other. And since there’s no specific government that could be universally agreed on, any form of government that is established would have to be some’s subjective idea of what’s rational forced on others without their consent—making this not a valid social contract. Risk-aversion: Again, by this logic, a risk taker would never do anything that could endanger his health or life! No risk taker would ever go skydiving because there’s a chance that he could die and never be able to take risks again. Obviously, this conclusion is absurd. Risk-takers, by definition, are willing to accept a chance of bad things happening to them. It’s true that we wouldn’t know the specific numbers and percentages in play, but, since we’re talking about risk-takers, this doesn’t matter—they could be willing to take the risk that the percentage of something bad happening is high, because they’re risk-takers! Actual vs Hypothetical Consent: “To make an analogy, let's say I propose that there is a hypothetical committee filled with people who are in-tune with moral understanding. In other words, they are so smart they can figure out what is morally correct. I then argue that whatever agreements the committee come to, is what is moral.” I suppose this is technically true, because you’re defining the committee as being able to figure out what is morally correct. But that isn’t at all what Rawls says, so this is a bad analogy. His hypothetical people aren’t morally perfect, they are essentially just perfect egalitarians. Only if you first accept that taking a bunch of hypothetical egalitarians and having them decide what society should look like is the correct way to determine morality does this theory work. In addition, actual consent does matter. The idea of a social contract is that people have rights, but because of this contract the government can violate them. Even Rawls’ hypothetical people are presumed free—they are supposed to freely choose what society should look like. And so even do accept Rawls’ egalitarian premises, even if his society was the best sort of society, that wouldn’t give government the moral right to violate people’s rights, any more than (to reuse my previous example) I would have the right to rape someone who I somehow knew deep down really did want to have sex with me.