RAWLS’ DEMOCRATIC EQUALITY AND THE IDEA OF CO-AUTHORSHIP

Since the publication of A Theory of Justice in 1971, the distributive justice debate has tried to offer the best interpretation of a fundamental normative idea, namely, when people are entitled to a certain distribution, this distribution must be accommodated by distributive rules that cannot be considered as arbitrary. Based on John Rawls' notion of democratic equality, in a society of free and equal citizens, nonarbitrary rules of social justice are those that eliminate both the arbitrariness of the social and natural lotteries. Over these 50 years, Rawls’ democratic equality was (re)interpreted according to three main normative ideas: impartiality, reciprocity and co-authorship. Inspired by Rainer Forst’s reading, this paper focuses on this last interpretation. The idea of co-authorship is grounded on an intersubjective, procedural and non-comprehensive reading of Kant’s notion of autonomy, according to which justice always demands an order of social relations free from arbitrary rule of some over others. From this perspective, this paper interprets Rawls' democratic equality as a normative idea that prescribes that citizens must not be deprived or cannot receive a smaller share of resources, or better social primary goods, than others than is necessary and indispensable to enable them to participate on fair terms in establishing and shaping the basic structure of society. Or, in other words, the idea that a just or fair distribution should be assessed by taking into account the fundamental question of whether people have the power to be co-authors of the basic structure of society