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I find Rawls confusing on this issue. He sometimes speaks as though he is trying to find universal principles of justice. But after thinking about it, I have decided that he isn't trying to do that.

First of all, as you pointed out, he explicitly renounces the idea of deducing the principles of justice from an analysis of ethical concepts.

More importantly, I think that if we look very closely at his idea of the original position, what we find is that the original position is intended to embody certain weak but widely accepted principles found in American cultural history.

Although the original position sometimes looks as though it is an abstraction created by Rawls' imagination, I don't think he sees it that way. It is actually an abstraction based on certain notions of justice that he thinks are found in our culture.

Rawls wants to formulate principles of justice that are fitted to a country like the United States. He isn't really trying to formulate principles for everyone everywhere. Hence the original position is allowed to embody certain assumptions that all or nearly all Americans make about justice. In this sense, I think we could say that Rawls' two principles are rooted in our culture. It's a loaded phrase, but maybe we could say that his principles are "culturally relative."

I'm open to argument on this; but at this point, I think that is what Rawls is saying.