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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... necessary to avoid an even greater injustice . Being first virtues of human activities , truth and justice are uncompromising These propositions seem to express our intuitive conviction of the primacy of justice . No doubt they are ...
... necessary truths or derivable from such truths . A conception of justice cannot be deduced from selfevident premises or conditions on principles ; instead , its justification is a matter of the mutual support of many considerations , of ...
... necessary part of intuitionism as I understand it . Perhaps it would be better if we were to speak of intuitionism in this broad sense as pluralism . Still , a conception of justice can be pluralistic without requiring us to weigh its ...
... necessary to move to a more general scheme for determining the balance of precepts , or at least for confining it within narrower limits . Thus we can consider the problems of justice by reference to certain ends of social policy . Yet ...
... necessary for a common conception of justice . I have reviewed two obvious and simple ways of dealing constructively with the priority problem : namely , either by a single overall principle , or by a plurality of principles in lexical ...