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I want to make a criticism that I think applies to both the first and second principles.

In the first principle, Rawls appears to establish a set of rights or liberties, and he sometimes says that these liberties are not to be traded of for economic gains. But all of this is seriously misleading. He criticises utilitarianism for not taking the distinction between individuals seriously, but I don't think he does either.

There are times when Rawls seems to regard everyone's capacities (e.g., their intelligence, wit, dedication, etc.) as communal resources. Here's what he says:

We see then that the difference principle represents, in effect, an agreement to regard the distribution of natural talents as a common asset and to share in the benefits of this distribution whatever it turns out to be. Those who have been favored by nature, whoever they are, may gain from their good fortune only on terms that improve the situation of those who have lost out. [Theory of Justice, section 17)

I'm not sure he is consistent when he does this. More important, I think the notion is positively chilling. What on earth would it mean if we were to follow it to its logical conclusions? In some sense you have a right to "extensive basic liberty," but your capacity to do mathematics, alas, is a "common asset." Rawls' argument is something like this: Our capacities are not deserved. They are "arbitrary" from the moral point of view. Therefore, they cannot be used as the basis of a just distribution of things or as the basis of justified claims that this or that be distributed in a certain way. But is that true? Is everything that can serve as a proper basis for distribution something that we must "deserve?" Might it not be that we simply have certain things like intelligence or dexterity or physical strength and that they can serve as a perfectly good basis for making claims about distribution? For example, I claim a higher salary because I am a better ball player. Or I claim royalties on a book which I could write (and most people could not). Robert Nozick makes this point, and I agree with him.

I may misunderstand this aspect of Rawls, but at the very least it's worth scrutinizing him very closely on this point.

It seems to me that this idea of making our capacities a communal resource basically underminies his whole notion of individual rights or basic liberty. Another way of saying this is that when Rawls does this he is going against his stated goal of not regarding some people as a means to increasing the welfare of others. Doesn't he, in effect, regard the more talented people as a means to improving the welfare of the less talented? Isn't that just what the second principle does?