... of their moral, religious and political commitments, each individual would know he/she had some, which they would be unlikely to willingly abandon if required to by the state. Similarly, such people could not honour a promise to accept poverty if it happened to be that lower life chances for the few were required to guarantee better chances for the many. The only set of principles capable of acceptance in this original position would be to safeguard the interests of the worst off in society - so inequalities in wealth and power can only exist when the worst off group would be even more impoverished if such inequalities were diminished. Rawls devised two principles for this theory of justice. The first is that: "Each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive total system of equal liberty compatible with a similar system of liberty for all" The second is that all ...

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