I’m not sure what you think the excerpt means. It’s just the intro to a paper. The author hasn’t made his case yet. I mean no offense, but here you don’t seem to know what you’re tlking about. Rawls is really not a bad read.
But it’s not a leap. Rawls is painstaking to a fault. But you not only didn’t read a word of his, you didn’t even read the paper about Rawls.
Rawls general theory would certainly not preclude legal abortion, however. He would allow only persons (and adult ones at that) to be party to his social contract. That paper will probably argue that we in some way accept fetuses as persons. Which of course, many people do. Not so many in Cambridge, where Rawls worked.
Philosophy, yes, but mostly political history tells us a lot about fairness. Rawls was Kantian in a very important way, but no one is perfect.
I meant that you not knowing how to live is not a philosophical problem. And by the way, you can’t get more general than asking how one ought to live.
The trouble with Existentialists is that they want cred for wandering around the mean streets of a world without God. Keepin’ it real an’ keepin’ it together. Geralizations (knowledge) is introduced at every turn, one would hope. In a democracy, the ones who know how it works are the ones who win. An increasingly liberal society is all but inevitable when democracy is fueled by education and affluence. And generalizations. American society is young, though, so it has a ways to go.