Rawls’s justice as fairness concerns the basic structure of society: institutions that distribute rights, opportunities, benefits, and burdens. Its principles protect equal basic liberties, require fair equality of opportunity, and restrict permitted social and economic inequalities through the difference principle. The original position offers a way to justify those principles.
Justice as fairness focuses on the basic institutions shaping people’s opportunities and life prospects. An institution can be efficient yet unfair if its advantages depend on social positions that people cannot reasonably control. The original-position device asks which principles people could select without exploiting knowledge of their own position. This approach shifts attention from a single generous transaction to enduring arrangements that influence who can obtain education, exercise liberties, and participate as an equal.