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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... kind of utilitarianism I shall describe here is the strict classical doctrine which receives perhaps its clearest and most accessible formulation in Sidgwick . The main idea is that society is rightly ordered , and therefore just , when ...
... kind is sometimes suggested by Bentham and Edgeworth , although it is not developed by them in any systematic way and to my knowledge it is not found in Sidgwick.14 For the present I shall simply assume that the persons in the original ...
... kind , namely , those that are required if its first principles are to be satisfied given the circumstances . Utilitarianism excludes those desires and propensities which if encouraged or permitted would , in view of the situation ...
... kind of intuitionism in “ Moral Complications and Moral Structures , " Natural Law Forum , vol . 13 ( 1968 ) . Intuitionism in the traditional sense includes certain epistemological theses , for example , those concerning the self ...
... kind . Not only are they intended to account for the ends of social policy , but the emphasis assigned to these principles should correspondingly determine the balance of these ends . For purposes of illustration , let us discuss a ...