What Is the Argument for the Fair Value of Political Liberty?

The equal political liberties are among the basic first-principle liberties in John Rawls’s theory of Justice as fairness. But Rawls insists, further, that the “fair value” of the political liberties must be guaranteed, and that a market economy must be embedded in an institutional structure that realizes this guarantee. The aim and the supposed capacity to assure fair value are what distinguish property-owning democracy and liberal democratic socialism from other ideal regime-types. Disavowing an interest in fair value is what disqualifies welfare-state capitalism as a possible realization of Justice as fairness. Yet Rawls never gives a perspicuous statement of the reasoning in the original position for the fair-value guarantee. This article gathers up the two distinct strands of Rawls’s argument, and presents it in a straightforward sequence. The exposition proceeds by contrasting Justice as fairness to a competitor political conception of justice, called here Neoliberalism, which is just like Justice as fairness but without the fair-value guarantee. A schema of the two-strand argument is presented in the Appendix.