Rawls was concerned with the conditions underlying the objectivity of moral and political judgment from the very beginning of his philosophical career. His first published essay, “Outline of a Decision Procedure for Ethics,” represents a first attempt at delineating the conditions that must be satisfied both by the competent judge and by the judgments that she reaches if they are to be deemed objective.

Despite changes in emphasis and restrictions of scope (by the time of his final writings, he makes it clear that he is interested exclusively in political objectivity),certain themes remain as constants throughout Rawls’s writings on objectivity. The first of these themes is that objectivity emerges from the taking up by moral and political judges of a certain standpoint. That standpoint is elaborated through the exclusion of those kinds of particularities that might incline otherwise competent judges to partiality. The original position, the situation of choice from which principles of justice are chosen, embodies this set of constraints. To quote Rawls in A Theory of Justice, “its stipulations express the restrictions on arguments that force us to consider the choice of principles unencumbered by the singularities of the circumstances in which we find ourselves” (TJ 516).