Kant, Mill and Rawls: Duty, Utility and Justice
Three Western thinkers who between them define the modern vocabulary of public ethics: duty, welfare, and fairness under uncertainty.
2. The Modern Indian Thinkers: Gandhi, Ambedkar, Vivekananda, Tagore, Aurobindo
3. Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and Confucius: Character and the Good State
4. Kant, Mill and Rawls: Duty, Utility and Justice ← you are here
5. Using Thinkers in an Answer: Which One, and When
If Chapter 3 gave you these as systems, this part gives you the thinkers and the specific formulations worth quoting. Rawls in particular is under-used by candidates and unusually well suited to Indian policy questions.
Kant: duty, universality and the person as an end
Kant grounds morality in reason rather than consequence. The categorical imperative in its first formulation — act only on that maxim which you could will to become a universal law — gives you a test that works instantly on any case study: what happens if every officer in this position does what I am about to do?
The second formulation is the more quotable and the more humane: treat humanity, whether in yourself or another, always as an end and never merely as a means. In administration this is the objection to using a citizen as an instrument of a target, and to sacrificing an individual’s rights for an aggregate benefit.
The honest limitation, which a good answer concedes: Kantian rigidity struggles with genuine emergencies, where two duties conflict and something must be broken.
Bentham and Mill: the greatest good, and where it fails
Bentham‘s principle — the greatest happiness of the greatest number — is how policy is actually made, since every budget and every scheme is a calculation about aggregate welfare. Mill’s refinement matters: he distinguished higher from lower pleasures, and in On Liberty defended individual freedom against majority preference through the harm principle — power may rightfully be exercised over an individual only to prevent harm to others.
The standard objection is the one to carry into case studies: aggregate welfare offers no protection to the minority whose suffering improves the total. Displacement for infrastructure is the recurring Indian illustration, and Mill’s harm principle is the internal corrective.
Rawls: justice as fairness
Rawls asks what principles you would choose for a society if you did not know your own position in it — the veil of ignorance. Not knowing whether you would be born rich or poor, upper caste or Dalit, able-bodied or disabled, you would choose principles that protect the worst-off, because you might be them.
From this he derives equal basic liberties for all, and the difference principle: inequalities are justified only if they work to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged. This is the single most useful Western framework for Indian policy questions — reservation, subsidy targeting, progressive taxation and welfare design can all be argued through it, and it gives a principled answer to why formal equality is insufficient.
Choosing between them in an answer
Use Kant when a rule is being bent for a convenient outcome, or when an individual is being treated as an instrument. Use utilitarianism when defending a policy that serves the many, and Mill’s harm principle when defending a minority against them. Use Rawls whenever the question concerns distribution, affirmative action or who should bear a cost — and use his veil of ignorance as a test the examiner will recognise: would I accept this arrangement if I did not know which side of it I would land on?
Revision — carry these five lines
- Kant: universalisability test; treat persons as ends, never merely as means; rigid in emergencies.
- Bentham: greatest happiness of the greatest number — how policy is actually made.
- Mill: higher and lower pleasures; the harm principle protects the individual from the majority.
- Rawls: veil of ignorance; the difference principle justifies inequality only if it helps the worst-off.
- Rawls is the strongest framework for Indian questions on reservation, subsidy and distribution.
Practice this sub-topic · 10 marks, 150 words
Examine the relevance of Rawls’s “veil of ignorance” for policy-making in a deeply unequal society such as India.
Approach: Explain the device precisely: principles chosen without knowledge of your own caste, class, gender or ability will protect the worst-off, since you might occupy that position. Derive the two consequences — equal basic liberties, and the difference principle permitting inequality only where it benefits the least advantaged. Apply to India: affirmative action for historically excluded groups, targeted subsidies rather than universal ones, progressive taxation, and prioritising public health and school education over subsidies that flow to the already advantaged. Test it against objections — critics argue it is an abstraction no real deliberator occupies, that it underweights merit and desert, and that it says little about how to compensate historical injustice specifically, which is why Ambedkar’s analysis of caste remains necessary alongside it. Conclude that its practical value is as a discipline for the decision-maker: before finalising a policy, ask whether you would accept it not knowing where in this society you would stand.
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