POWER 50 · Day 3 — Conceptions of Justice: From Greek Virtue to Rawlsian Fairness

POWER 50 is fifty capsules across fifty days — the whole PSIR syllabus revised once, in the order the syllabus is actually built, one topic a day. Read the capsule, write the same day, don’t break the chain. Running alongside: PSIR Dynamics 2026 and the PYQ Vault — 560 previous-year questions spread across the fifty days, roughly eleven a day.

Day 3 — Conceptions of Justice

Today’s capsule covers the full arc of justice in political theory: from the classical formulations of Plato and Aristotle — harmony, proportional equality, distributive and corrective justice — through the procedural versus substantive fault line, all the way to Rawls’ A Theory of Justice and its reception. The capsule maps the original position, the veil of ignorance, the maximin rule and the two principles (Liberty Principle and the Difference Principle) in lexical order, before turning to Rawls’ critics — Nozick’s libertarian entitlement theory, the Marxist critique, feminist objections from Susan Moller Okin and Martha Nussbaum, and the communitarian challenge mounted by Sandel, MacIntyre and Walzer. The Ambedkar–Rawls comparison — egalitarian social justice versus pure procedural justice — closes the unit. Between 2017 and 2025, this unit carried 2 × 10-markers, 5 × 15-markers and 4 × 20-markers at UPSC — Rawls and the communitarian critique sit at the centre of almost every cycle.

Write before the evening:

1. How has Rawls enriched the idea of justice in liberalism? (UPSC 2021, 20m)
2. Examine communitarian perspectives on justice. (UPSC 2019, 15m)
3. Dr. Ambedkar’s idea of social justice leads to “egalitarian justice” as compared to Rawls’ “justice as fairness” which aims at the notion of “pure procedural justice”. Comment. (UPSC 2022, 20m)

If you go blank on the original position, the Difference Principle or the communitarian line, it is covered in full in your Foundation & OGP class notes and handouts — revise it, then write.

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