Rawls e il merito

The article explores the role of merit within John Rawls’s work, A Theory of Jus- tice, in order to understand the centrality of this notion in his proposal known as justice as fairness. After having given a general account of this proposal, the arti- cle focuses in particular on the notion of merit, which connects to other principles (redress, reciprocity, and fraternity) of Rawls’s theory, showing an internally co- herent system based on an intuition (the moral arbitrariness of natural gifts and social advantages) capable of effectively accounting for the principle of difference. The article closes with a brief discussion of an evolution in the debate on merit within another theoretical proposal, luck egalitarianism, which goes in the oppo- site direction to that of Rawls.