A just society would be one in which inequalities in wealth were acceptable provided that the people at the top of the heap got there as a result of effort and skill

From The Moral Sense by James Q. Wilson. Page 73.

Some readers may object that my argument is a not-very-subtle way of justifying inequality of condition or private possession of property. But the argument so far is not that inequality of condition is generally necessary, but only that however we judge the worth of our fellows, we will tend to consider distributions and obligations just if they are proportional to that worth.

That is how I think people make judgments, and it is different from how the famous contemporary philosopher John Rawls thinks they make them. In his theory of justice, Rawls asks us to imagine a group of rational people trying to decide on what social rules they would be willing to live by before knowing what position they would occupy in the society that would be created by these rules. In this “original position,” he says, they would agree on the following principle: inequalities in wealth will be considered just only if they result in compensating benefits for everyone, and in particular for the least advantaged members of society.36 As I understand him, everybody in Rawls’s universe is averse to risk; each wants to
make certain that, if he winds up on the bottom of the heap, the bottom is as attractive as possible.

But many people are in fact not averse to risk, they are risk takers; to them, a just society would be one in which inequalities in wealth were acceptable provided that the people at the top of the heap got there as a result of effort and skill, And even people who are not risk takers may endorse this position because they think it fair that rewards should be proportional to effort, even if some people lose out entirely. (These same people might also expect their church or government to take care of those who lost out.) They have this view of fairness because they recognize that people differ in talent, energy, temperament, and interests; that conflicts among such people are inevitable; and that matching, as best one can, rewards to contributions is the best way of handling that conflict.