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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... recognize as reasonable . These constraints express what we are prepared to regard as limits on fair terms of social cooperation . One way to look at the idea of the original position , therefore , is to see it as an expository device ...
... recognized and ranked in value by criteria that do not presuppose any standards of right , or what we would normally think of as such . Whereas if the distribution of goods is also counted as a good , perhaps a higher order one , and ...
... recognized , the place of the impartial spectator and the emphasis on sympathy in the history of utilitarian thought is readily understood . For it is by the conception of the impartial spectator and the use of sympathetic ...
... recognize as the basis of justice that to which men would consent . Here we may note a curious anomaly . It is customary to think of utilitarianism as individualistic , and certainly there are good reasons for this . The utilitarians ...
... recognize , its fundamental contention . The merit of the classical view as formulated by Bentham , Edgeworth , and Sidgwick is that it clearly recognizes what is at stake , namely , the relative priority of the principles of justice ...