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. |
From inside the book
Results 1-5 of 83
... present the main idea of justice as fairness , a theory of justice that generalizes and carries to a higher level of abstraction the traditional conception of the social contract . The compact of society is replaced by an initial ...
... present from the start . The intuitive notion here is that this structure contains various social positions and that men born into different positions have different expectations of life determined , in part , by the political system as ...
... present a conception of justice which generalizes and carries to a higher level of abstraction the familiar theory of the social contract as found , say , in Locke , Rousseau , and Kant . " In order to do this we are not to think of the ...
... present that this choice problem has a solution , determines the principles of justice . In justice as fairness the original position of equality corresponds to the state of nature in the traditional theory of the social contract . This ...
... presents . These matters I shall take up in the immediately succeeding chapters . It may be observed , however , that once the principles of justice are thought of as arising from an original agreement in a situation of equality , it is ...