Kenneth J. Arrow is an American Nobel-laureate welfare economist (b. 1921). He is the founder of modern social choice theory, and his General Possibility Theorem inluenced Rawls’s TJ. Arrow claims that there exists no collective decision-making rule that satisies four seemingly uncontroversial conditions that any democratic society should satisfy (Pareto, unrestricted domain, independence of irrelevant alternatives, and non-dictatorship). In Arrow (1973), he raises a set of the earliest, and still most fundamental, criticisms to Rawls’s TJ.

First, Arrow argues that Rawls’s argument against John Harsanyi’s justiication of average utilitarianism is false. According to Rawls, in order for average utilitarianism to be chosen in the original position, Harsanyi and other defenders of average utilitarianism must assume that the attitude of the parties is riskneutral, whereas Rawls contends that the parties would have a risk-averse attitude and thus choose the two principles of justice. Arrow, however, argues that the von Neumann–Morgenstern function for assigning utilities under uncertainty can incorporate a risk-averse attitude into its determination of utility. Rawls’s principles of justice, including the priority of liberty, are perfectly consistent with a general form of utilitarianism and cannot be seen as a rival theory to utilitarianism. Second, Arrow criticizes Rawls’s notion of primary goods. Rawls believes that primary goods can avoid the problem of interpersonal comparison that utilitarianism would encounter. However, Arrow argues that if primary goods are used as the basis for interpersonal comparisons, then a healthy person and a chronically ill person, who requires many resources to maintain a normal level of functioning, will be deemed equally well off insofar as their possession of primary goods is at the same level.