Abstract

This paper develops a full account of Rawls's notion of a well-ordered society and uses it to address two luck egalitarian objections to his principles of justice. The first is an internal criticism which claims that Rawls's account of justice is better captured by a responsibility-sensitive egalitarian account. The second is an external objection according to which, regardless of the alleged inconsistency between Rawls's principles and his account of justice, we should reject those principles in favour of a responsibility-sensitive criterion because it better captures our moral intuitions about distributive justice. The argument presented answers both objections by defending the value of well-orderedness and showing the difficulties of responsibility-sensitive egalitarian conceptions in realizing this ideal.