CONCEPT
The Least Advantaged
Rawls's technical term for the group of people who occupy the worst position in the distribution of primary goods — the reference class from whose perspective every institutional arrangement must be evaluated under the difference principle.
The least advantaged are the moral center of Rawlsian justice. The difference principle asks whether an institutional arrangement maximizes the position of those at the bottom, and the identification of "those at the bottom" is therefore not incidental but constitutive of the framework. Rawls specified the reference class with care: the least advantaged are not those who are worst off by some subjective measure of suffering but those who possess the smallest share of the primary goods — income, wealth, opportunities, authority, and the social bases of self-respect — that every rational person wants regardless of her particular conception of the good life. Identifying the least advantaged in any particular society requires empirical judgment, but the identification is not merely a statistical matter. It requires asking who, structurally, benefits least from the basic arrangement, and designing institutions from that perspective rather than from the perspective of the median or the average.
