Is It Fair That Some Kids Start Life Richer Than Others?
Two kids, two starting lines
Imagine two twelve-year-olds. One lives in a wealthy suburb and goes to a school with science labs and new computers. The other lives in a village with no electricity and works in a field before breakfast. They are both smart, curious, and full of ideas. But the second kid faces obstacles the first one never even sees.
Why should sheer luck—where someone happens to be born—determine so much? That question launched one of the biggest fights in modern political philosophy. It all began because a quiet American professor named John Rawls (1921–2002) wrote a book that was both deeply careful and quietly explosive.
Rawls asked: what would a fair society look like? To answer, he invented a thought experiment. Imagine you are about to be born, but you have no idea which family, class, or set of talents you will have. Behind this “veil of ignorance,” Rawls argued, you would pick two rules. One is that everyone gets the same basic freedoms. The other—and this was the shock—is that any inequality in money or opportunities must help the people who are worst off. He called this the difference principle. If a surgeon earns more than a cashier, the only reason that’s okay is if that pay gap somehow makes life better for the person at the bottom.
Rawls’s theory felt revolutionary. It said your talents and your parents’ income are accidents of fate—morally random—and a just society corrects for that unfairness. But there was a catch.
Why stop at the border?
Rawls insisted his principles apply only inside a single people—a nation with its own government, laws, and shared political life. What happens between countries, he thought, is a different kind of problem.
Philosophers immediately pushed back. Charles Beitz (born 1949) and Thomas Pogge (born 1953) pointed out a puzzle: Rawls said your social class was morally random, so justice should not let it trap you. But isn’t the country of your birth just another accident, like your eye color? If the difference principle is truly about fairness, they argued, then we should apply it to the whole world. The person whose life matters is the global worst-off—not just the poorest person in France or Japan, but the poorest person anywhere.
Their case got sharper when they looked at the global economy. Beitz and Pogge both argued that the world already has something like what Rawls calls a basic structure—a network of trade agreements, banking rules, and international institutions that shapes who gets what. Just as a country’s legal system sets the terms for jobs and property inside its borders, global institutions set the terms for who wins and loses worldwide. If that structure exists, they said, then Rawls’s own logic demands that we make sure it works for the poorest people on Earth.
Not everyone agreed. Brian Barry (1936–2009) pushed back with a simpler idea: trade is not the same as citizenship. People who exchange goods—even lots of goods—do not suddenly become members of one big cooperative team. You might buy chocolate from a farmer in Ghana and feel grateful, but that does not give you the same duties you feel toward your neighbor. Something else, Barry thought, must explain why citizens inside a country owe each other a special level of fairness.
How Rawls answered: a separate game for peoples
Rawls heard the criticism and answered in a later book called The Law of Peoples. He stuck to his guns. In the international realm, he said, the players are not individual persons but peoples—whole societies with their own governments and cultures.
He imagined a second deal, this time among representatives of different peoples behind a veil of ignorance. What rules would they pick? Not the difference principle. They would agree to respect each other’s freedom, honor treaties, avoid invading one another, and protect basic human rights. They would also accept a duty of assistance: well-ordered peoples must help burdened societies—countries too poor or unstable to build decent institutions. But once every society could stand on its own feet, the duty would end. There is no permanent obligation to keep evening out wealth across borders.
Why such a sharp difference? Rawls gave several reasons. First, a people’s wealth comes mostly from its political culture—its institutions, work habits, and public decisions—not from outside forces. Forcing a transfer from a hardworking, well-run country to a struggling one would disrespect the choices each people has made. Second, he believed that the international system simply does not have the kind of powerful, coercive legal machinery that a national government has. There is no world tax office, no world supreme court with real teeth. Without that shared coercive framework, the deep egalitarian demands of domestic justice do not get triggered.
For Rawls, a just world is one where every country is well-ordered—not necessarily equal in wealth. Once that is achieved, there are “no surprises” left.
The coercion question: what makes a rule stick?
Rawls left a big question hanging. If coercion—the power of a legal system to force you to obey—is what makes egalitarian justice kick in domestically, what about the ways in which powerful countries can force weaker ones into bad deals? Some philosophers turned the Rawlsian tools right back against him.
Left institutionalists like Pogge in his later work and others argued that global institutions are already coercive in subtle but powerful ways. When a poor country has no real choice but to accept trade terms set by the wealthy, or when powerful nations can topple a government that misbehaves, that starts to look like a kind of law enforcement without a badge. Right institutionalists, following Rawls’s lead, responded that the sort of coercion that triggers strict equality is a very specific thing: a legal system that structures your daily life, claims to act in your name, and treats you as a co-author of its rules. Trade pressure—however unpleasant—is not the same as being in the same courtroom with a judge who can sentence you.
This debate matters because it determines how we think about global institutions today. If the right institutionalists are correct, then fixing global injustice means making sure every country is well-ordered and respects human rights—not flattening the gap between rich and poor nations. If the left institutionalists are correct, then the global economic system itself needs deep reform, because even a world of decent governments could be rigged against the global poor.
Why it’s still your problem
Rawls died in 2002, but the argument he started is more alive than ever. Every time you drink a cup of coffee grown in Ethiopia or wear a shirt sewn in Bangladesh, you are taking part in the global basic structure. The choices made by your government, the companies you buy from, and even your own family become threads in that web.
Some philosophers, like Simon Caney, now say we don’t even need to prove that a global structure exists. If all humans deserve equal concern, then a child born into poverty anywhere has a moral claim on you—just because you are both human. Others push back: does that mean a perfectly just world becomes unjust the moment a richer island rises from the sea? That seems hard to swallow.
The history of colonialism adds another layer. Many of today’s poorest countries were brutalized, stripped of resources, and left with broken institutions by European empires. If that past injustice helped create the current gap, then the wealthy nations may owe something more than simple charity—perhaps a debt of repair.
In the end, the question is not just for professors. It’s about who counts as part of your team—and whether you can build a fair team with everyone on Earth.
Think about it
- If you could push a button that would make every country equally wealthy overnight, would that be fair even if some countries had worked harder to build what they have? Why or why not?
- Imagine your family adopts a rule that everyone inside the house shares equally, but other families on the block are not included. Is that rule selfish, wise, or something in between?
- Does knowing that the chocolate bar you bought came from a farmer who earns very little change what you think you should do with your allowance? What are the practical ways you could respond?
