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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... 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 its major institutions are arranged so as to achieve the greatest ...
... doctrine conflicts with these sentiments of justice , he maintains that common sense precepts of justice and notions of natural right have but a subordinate validity as secondary rules ; they arise from the fact that under the ...
... doctrine that it relies very heavily upon the natural facts and contingencies of human life in determining what forms of moral character are to be encouraged in a just society . The moral ideal of justice as fairness is more deeply ...
... doctrine . For the role of equal rights in Locke is precisely to ensure that the only permissible departures from the state of nature are those which respect these rights and serve the common interest . It is clear that all the ...
... doctrine . Indeed , it may be true . We cannot take for granted that there must be a complete derivation of our judgments of social justice from recognizably ethical principles . The intuitionist believes to the contrary that the ...