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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... . , Harvard University Press , 1955 ) , pp . 65–68 , for parallel remarks concerning the justification of the principles of deductive and inductive inference . 20 cases which may lead us to revise our judgments . Justice as Fairness.
Original Edition John Rawls. cases which may lead us to revise our judgments . Yet for the time being we have done what we can to render coherent and to justify our convictions of social justice . We have reached a conception of the ...
... lead to the most good . It is essential to keep in mind that in a teleological theory the good is defined independently from the right . This means two things . First , the theory accounts for our considered judgments as to which things ...
... lead to a lesser net balance of satisfaction . But this restriction is largely formal , and in the absence of fairly detailed knowledge of the circumstances it does not give much indication of what these desires and propensities are ...
... lead to falsehood and oversimplification , as when one settles everything by the principle of utility . The only way therefore to dispute intuitionism is to set forth the recognizably ethical criteria that account for the weights which ...