Kurt Vonnegut’s short story “Harrison Bergeron” imagines a dystopia—an imaginary awful world—where everybody is equal. Nobody can be smarter or more handsome or more able than anybody else; if you’re naturally smarter than everyone else, handicaps are applied to level everyone to be equal.

What would the philosopher john Rawls have to say about the world of “Harrison Bergeron”?

What would Rawls have to say about Harrison’s defiance of the enforced equality of his society?

How does his idea of “moral desert” play into this? What do you think? Are justice and equality the same thing? Why or why not?