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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... determine this division of advantages and for underwriting an agreement on the proper distributive shares . These principles are the principles of social justice : they provide a way of assigning rights and duties in the basic ...
... determining what they take to be the proper distribution of the benefits and burdens of social cooperation . Thus it seems ... determine a proper balance between competing claims to the advantages of social life . Men can agree to this ...
Original Edition John Rawls. sons are relevant in determining rights and duties and they specify which division of ... determine the appropriate distributive shares , the way in which a conception does this is bound to affect the ...
... determine the division of advantages from social cooperation . By major institutions I understand the political ... determined , in part , by the political system as well as by economic and social circumstances . In this way the ...
... determine this balance . I have also characterized justice as but one part of a social ideal , although the theory I shall propose no doubt extends its everyday sense . This theory is not offered as a description of ordinary meanings ...