A conception of justice is stable when members of a society adhere to it over time, so that their basic institutions remain in conformity with its principles of justice. Since Rawls argued that justice as fairness “generates its own supportive moral attitudes” (TJ, p. 350), his conception of justice would be self-stabilizing. He seems to suggest at one point that the part of his conception that would do the self-stabilizing is his principles of justice (TJ, p. 119). In this chapter, I shall argue that it is illuminating to think of stability as effected, not by Rawls's principles, but by the agreement upon them. More precisely, it is illuminating to read Rawls as arguing that justice as fairness would stabilize itself because the agreement reached in the original position is a special kind of what is sometimes called a “self-enforcing agreement.”

One advantage of this reading, as we shall see in section 11.6, is that it offers a clear and economical way of understanding what it is for a conception to be self-stabilizing. Rawls averred that self-stabilization tells strongly in a conception's favor, but he does not say why (TJ, p. 154). The interpretation offered here suggests an answer to that question. Another advantage, which we shall see in section 11.7, is that it offers a precise understanding of Rawls's transition to political liberalism. Rawls said he made the turn to political liberalism because he came to think that the stability arguments of TJ failed. My reading explains that failure as the failure of the agreement reached in the original position to satisfy two of the conditions of self-enforcement. This reading also helps us understand the account of stability Rawls offered in PL by displaying new conditions of self-enforcement and by showing how the later Rawls could maintain that the agreement reached in the original position satisfied them. Finally, we shall see in section 11.8 that because this reading highlights the importance of the original position in Rawls's treatments of stability, it helps to answer the much-controverted question of whether the original position is essential to Rawls's theory. It does so by identifying a crucial premise in both his accounts of stability that depends upon his reasons for devising it.