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I want to make a connection to what we were talking about in our first session. We talked about "treating equal cases equally" as a formal principle of justice, and we referred to Chaim Perelman's essay on justice.

Rawls accepts the idea that the principles of justice must treat equal cases equally. He even refers to Chaim Perelman on this point. He also agrees that this kind of "formal justice" is not sufficient to guarantee "substantive justice." That's just what we said in our last session.

He is trying to tell us that formal justice must be supplemented by additional principles, and the original position he describes is part of the procedure for choosing those principles.