R EMARKS ON THE L EXICAL O RDER OF R AWLS ’ S T WO P RINCIPLES OF J USTICE One can broadly divide objections to Rawls’s two principles of justice (, the liberty principle and the equality principle, the latter being a conjunction of two as they may be called “sub-principles” – the fair equality of opportunity sub-principle and the dif- ference sub-principle) into substantive and methodological. The former address the - tive objections are most frequently formulated against two sub-principles of the second - tory framework («original position» as a contractarian device for impartial selection of principles of justice), and assuming that this framework is sound, the plausibility of the claim that agents in the original position would indeed choose the Rawlsian two prin- ciples of justice. Surprisingly, in the relevant literature scarce attention has been paid to the important Rawlsian claim that the two principles are lexically ordered. In point of fact, the claim that the two principles are lexically ordered is of equal importance within Rawls’s theory of justice as the very content of these principles. In the present essay we shall argue that the Rawlsian two principles of justice CANNOT BE LEXICALLY ORDERED. Our objection therefore does not say that the Rawlsian principles are lexically or- dered in a wrong way (so that, for instance, the equality principle should be lexically superior with regard to the liberty principle); it says that they cannot be lexically or- dered at all. This objection is, as we shall see, both methodological and substantive because it appeals to technical arguments aimed to demonstrate that it is impossible to realize the lexically ordered principles in practice, as well as to substantive arguments aimed to show that even if the lexically ordered principles can be realized in practice, their realization would be incompatible with our substantive moral intuitions. At the outset of our analysis of the lexical order of Rawls’s two principles of justice, it seems advisable to recall the content of these principles: (1) Each person has the same indefeasible claim to a fully adequate scheme of equal basic liberties, which scheme is compatible with the same scheme of liberties for all. 1 1 Rawls [2001: 42-43].