A Theory of Justice: Original EditionJohn Rawls aims to express an essential part of the common core of the democratic tradition—justice as fairness—and to provide an alternative to utilitarianism, which had dominated the Anglo-Saxon tradition of political thought since the nineteenth century. Rawls substitutes the ideal of the social contract as a more satisfactory account of the basic rights and liberties of citizens as free and equal persons. “Each person,” writes Rawls, “possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override.” Advancing the ideas of Rousseau, Kant, Emerson, and Lincoln, Rawls’s theory is as powerful today as it was when first published. |
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... Defined 243 40. The Kantian Interpretation of Justice as Fairness 251 CHAPTER V. DISTRIBUTIVE SHARES 258 41. The ... Definition of Civil Disobedience 363 56. The Definition of Conscientious Refusal 368 57. The Justification of Civil ...
... defined , then , by the role of its principles in assigning rights and duties and in defining the appropriate ... definition is framed to apply to actions , and persons are thought to be just insofar as they have , as one of the ...
... defined initial situation . The merit of the contract terminology is that it conveys the idea that principles of ... define ideas and accords with natural piety . There are then several advantages in the use of the term “ contract ...
... defines and connects these two basic notions . Now it seems that the simplest way of relating them is taken by teleological theories : the good is defined independently from the right , and then the right is defined as that which ...
... defined independently from the right . This means two things . First , the theory accounts for our considered judgments as to which things are good ( our judgments of value ) as a separate class of judgments intuitively distinguishable ...