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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... liberty compatible with a similar liberty for others . Second : social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both ( a ) reasonably expected to be to everyone's advantage , and ( b ) attached to positions and ...
... liberty ( the right to vote and to be eligible for public office ) together with freedom of speech and assembly ; liberty of conscience and freedom of thought ; freedom of the person along with the right to hold ( personal ) property ...
... liberty with respect to social and economic advantages , as 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 ...
... liberty compatible with a like liberty for all . The only reason for circumscribing the rights defining liberty and making men's freedom less extensive than it might otherwise be is that these equal rights as institutionally defined ...
... liberty be counterbalanced in this way . Applied to the basic structure , the principle of utility would have us maximize the sum of expectations of representative men ( weighted by the number of persons they represent , on the ...