What is important is that there is no rational reason for excluding people from our most basic social institutions because of their sexual identities.
Abstract: Part One defends Rawls's focus on basic social institutions, and his maximin idea, against the criticisms of Nozick and Sandel.
Reform-minded police saw changes in morals, increasing crime and corruption, and later the Great Depression as symptoms of the erosion of such basic social institutions as the family, churches, schools, and neighbourhoods.
The "first subject of justice," Rawls says, is principles that regulate the basic social institutions that constitute the "basic structure of society" (TJ sect.2).
Rawls's idea is that, being reasonable and rational, persons (like us) who regard ourselves as free and equal should be in a position to accept and endorse as morally justifiable the principles of justice regulating our basic social institutions and individual conduct.
It is a society in which (1) everyone willingly accepts and agrees to the same principles of justice; (2) these principles are successfully realized in basic social institutions and generally are complied with; and (3) reasonable persons are morally motivated to comply by their sense of justice (TJ 4 5, §69).
Possible answers include the principles of justice (Rousseau, Rawls), the design of the basic social institutions (Rawls), the commitment to give up to a sovereign government (some or all of) one's rights (Hobbes, Locke), the adoption of a disposition to be (conventionally) moral (Gauthier, Hampton).
In general, Rawls's positions on these issues are grounded on an assumption of the political and institutional bases of distributive justice, and the fundamental role of society and its basic social institutions in the development of our natural and moral capacities and in determining our characters, aims, and future prospects.
(Rawls does not include sex in A Theory of Justice (Rawls 1971), but adds it in "Fairness to Goodness" (Rawls 1975, 537).) Susan Okin proposes we "take seriously both the notion that those behind the veil of ignorance do not know what sex they are and the requirement that the family and the gender system, as basic social institutions, are to be subject to scrutiny" (Okin 1989, 101).
