Educated at Princeton, he taught at Cornell and Harvard, and in 1971 published A Theory of Justice , whose leading idea is that of justice as fairness - the hope for social institutions that do not confer morally arbitrary lifelong advantages on some persons at the expense of others. It is based on a new form of social contract theory - not an actual social contract but a hypothetical one. We are to imagine ourselves in an original position of equality, in which we do not know most of the socially significant facts about ourselves - race, sex, religion, economic class, social standing, natural abilities, even our conception of the good life. Under this veil of ignorance , we are to decide what principles we could agree to on the basis of a desire to further our own aims and interests, whatever they may be. Not knowing our position in society or our conception of the good, we are driven by this fiction to an equal concern for the fate of everyone, and Rawls maintains that we would give priority in choice of principles to avoiding the worst possible life prospects, with emphasis first on the preservation of personal and political liberty and second on the amelioration of socio-economic inequality.
Equal liberty rules out persecution, discrimination, and political oppression.
Equal opportunity ensures that those with equal ability and motivation have equal chances of success, whatever class they are born into. Rawls opposes utilitarianism , holding that the maximum total good may not be pursued by means which impose unfair disadvantages on minorities, including the unskilled. More generally, he claims that the right is prior to and independent of the good, and cannot be defined as that which will promote or maximize the good. Certain conditions on the social relations between people and the way they may be treated take precedence over the production of desirable results. This is opposed to the idea that rights are just human conventions justified instrumentally by their usefulness in promoting the general welfare.