Beyond a universal principle of justice: Normative implications of preference measurement assumptions

The main conclusions of two classical theories of justice can be represented as solutions to a decision making problem. Rawls’ second principle of justice is a result of applying the maximin criterion for decision-making behind the ‘veil of ignorance’. The utilitarian principle of maximizing average utility, meanwhile, can be traced back to applying the Laplace criterion of decision making behind the veil of ignorance. This article makes explicit the different assumptions about preference measurement and assumptions about interpersonal comparisons of utility that need to be made to use either of these principles. Once these assumptions are made explicit, it becomes clear that the choice between theories of justice cannot be exclusively settled by an exchange of arguments for one kind of distributional arrangement over the other, but is also a question of what kind of measurement assumptions are more plausible in a given context.