Rawls's justice theory and its relations to the concept of merit goods

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the status that the concept of merit goods (as first stated by Musgrave in The Theory of Public Finance) has/should have in Rawls's theory. We first examine Rawls's position regarding this issue in A Theory of Justice. Next, we claim that the attitude of the ‘second’ Rawls about it is rather ambiguous and vacillates between exclusion and inclusion. We attempt to prove that thanks to the concepts Rawls has developed from 1985 onwards (especially the concept of public reason), he could have resorted to the concept of merit goods to cope better with his new objectives.