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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... defined independently from the right . This means two things . First , the theory accounts for our considered ... definition of the good . The clarity and simplicity of classical teleological theories derives largely from the fact ...
... definition , then , the latter is a deontological theory , one that either does not specify the good independently ... defined as non - teleological ones , not as views that characterize the rightness of institutions and acts ...
... Definitions and analyses of meaning do not have a special place : definition is but one device used in setting up the general structure of theory . Once the whole framework is worked out , definitions have no distinct status and stand ...
... defined by the lexical order of the two principles , would be reasonable . Offhand , this ranking appears extreme and too special a case to be of much interest ; but there is more justification for it than would appear at first sight ...
... defining liberty and making men's freedom less extensive than it might otherwise be is that these equal rights as institutionally defined would interfere with one another . Another thing to bear in mind is that when principles mention ...