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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... give a full account of our judgments and necessitates a plurality of competing principles . He contends that attempts to go beyond these principles either reduce to triviality , as when it is said that social justice is to give every ...
... give to the appeal to our intuitive capacities unguided by constructive and recognizably ethical criteria . Intuitionism denies that there exists any useful and explicit solution to the priority problem . I now turn to a brief ...
... give considerable scope to intuition , since we may not be able to formulate the principle which determines them . Nevertheless , we have asked a much more limited question and have substituted for an ethical judgment a judgment of ...
... give a better match with our considered judgments on reflection than these recognized alternatives . Thus justice as fairness moves us closer to the philosophical ideal ; it does not , of course , achieve it . This explanation of ...
... give an account of our considered judgments in reflective equilibrium . This is the conception of the subject adopted by most classical British writers through Sidgwick . I see no reason to depart from it.26 Moreover , if we can find an ...