 The original position is not a bargaining situation where the parties make proposals and counterproposals and negotiate over different principles of justice. Nor is it a wide ranging discussion where the parties deliberate and design their own conception of justice (unlike, for example, Habermas’ discourse ethics; see Habermas, 1995). Instead, the parties’ deliberations are much more constrained. They are presented with a list of conceptions of justice taken from the tradition of western political philosophy. These include different versions of utilitarianism, perfectionism, and intuitionism (or pluralist views), rational egoism, justice as fairness, and a group of “mixed conceptions” that combine elements of these (For Rawls’s initial list see TJ 124/107) (Rawls later says libertarianism should also be added to the list, and the principles of justice would still be agreed to [JF 83]; Nozick [1974, 198ff] agrees and says the OP is incapable of yielding entitlement principles due to the self-interest of the parties.). The parties’ deliberations are confined to discussing and agreeing upon the conception that each finds most rational, given their specified interests. In a series of pairwise comparisons, they consider all the conceptions of justice made available to them and ultimately agree unanimously to accept the conception that survives this winnowing process. In this regard, the original position is best seen as a kind of selection process wherein the parties’ deliberations are constrained by the background conditions imposed by the original position as well as the list of conceptions of justice provided to them. They are assigned the task of agreeing on principles for designing the basic structure of a self-contained society under the circumstances of justice. 