Abstract
Justice as Fairness by J. Rawls (1971 and 2001) will be
reconsidered in a formal way. We reformulate his theory in an axiomatic
manner and revise his original position. We propose a new concept of
fundamental rights as membership of the original position, and on this
basis, we justify Rawls’s thesis of the priority of the first principle
over the second. This would address the criticisms of Arrow (1973) and
Hart (1973). This revision of the original position will enable us to
deduce the two principles without reference to the primary goods or
maximin principles. Therefore, the criticisms of Harsanyi (1975) and Sen
(1980) do not apply to our theory. We do this by providing a rigorous
definition of reflective equilibrium, which Rawls did not do, and we
show that the two principles of justice are in reflective equilibrium
but the libertarian principle of Nozick (1974) is not.