John Rawls
The bad man desires arbitrary power. What moves the evil man is the love of injustice.Collection: Power
In constant pursuit of money to finance campaigns, the political system is simply unable to function. Its deliberative powers are paralyzed.Collection: Finance
The principles of justice are chosen behind a veil of ignorance.
Ideally citizens are to think of themselves as if they were legislators and ask themselves what statutes, supported by what reasons satisfying the criterion of reciprocity, they would think is most reasonable to enact.
Certainly it is wrong to be cruel to animals and the destruction of a whole species can be a great evil. The capacity for feelings of pleasure and pain and for the form of life of which animals are capable clearly impose duties of compassion and humanity in their case.
The fairest rules are those to which everyone would agree if they did not know how much power they would have.Collection: Agree
A just society is a society that if you knew everything about it, you'd be willing to enter it in a random place.Collection: Willing
The natural distribution is neither just nor unjust; nor is it unjust that persons are born into society at some particular position. These are simply natural facts. What is just and unjust is the way that institutions deal with these facts.Collection: Facts
An injustice is tolerable only when it is necessary to avoid an even greater injustice.Collection: Religion
In all sectors of society there should be roughly equal prospects of culture and achievement for everyone similarly motivated and endowed. The expectations of those with the same abilities and aspirations should not be affected by their social class.Collection: Class
Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought. A theory however elegant and economical must be rejected or revised if it is untrue; likewise laws and institutions no matter how efficient and well-arranged must be reformed or abolished if they are unjust.Collection: Law
Liberal constitutional democracy is supposed to ensure that each citizen is free and equal and protected by basic rights and liberties.Collection: Rights
[E]ach person is to have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with a similar liberty for others.Collection: Liberty
The naturally advantaged are not to gain merely because they are more gifted, but only to cover the costs of training and education and for using their endowments in ways that help the less fortunate as well.Collection: Training
No one deserves his greater natural capacity nor merits a more favorable starting place in society.Collection: Merit
Justice is the first virtue of social institutions.Collection: Justice
Justice as fairness provides what we want.Collection: Justice
A society regulated by a public sense of justice is inherently stable.Collection: Justice
Clearly when the liberties are left unrestricted they collide with one another.Collection: Liberty
The intolerant can be viewed as free-riders, as persons who seek the advantages of just institutions while not doing their share to uphold them.Collection: Share
Justice is happiness according to virtue.Collection: Justice
Many of our most serious conflicts are conflicts within ourselves. Those who suppose their judgements are always consistent are unreflective or dogmatic.Collection: Judgement
Any comprehensive doctrine, religious or secular, can be introduced into any political argument at any time, but I argue that people who do this should also present what they believe are public reasons for their argument. So their opinion is no longer just that of one particular party, but an opinion that all members of a society might reasonably agree to, not necessarily that they would agree to. What's important is that people give the kinds of reasons that can be understood and appraised apart from their particular comprehensive doctrines.Collection: Religious
The sense of justice is continuous with the love of mankind.Collection: Justice
The fault of the utilitarian doctrine is that it mistakes impersonality for impartiality.Collection: Mistake
Ideal legislators do not vote their interests.Collection: Vote
Properly understood, then, the desire to act justly derives in part from the desire to express most fully what we are or can be, namely free and equal rational beings with the liberty to choose.Collection: Desire
Of course, we know that not everyone agrees with assisted suicide, but people might agree that one has the right to it, even if they're not themselves going to exercise it.Collection: Suicide
Now the good of political life is a great political good. It is not a secular good specified by a comprehensive doctrine like those of Kant or Mill. You could characterize this political good as the good of free and equal citizens recognizing the duty of civility to one another: the duty to give citizens public reasons for one's political actions.Collection: Giving
We may suppose that everyone has in himself the whole form of a moral conception.Collection: May
How did Madison get separation through Virginia and later Congress? The Baptists, the Presbyterians, and the smaller sects hated Jefferson; to them he was a secularist of the worst kind. But Madison could get Jefferson's bill passed because the Baptists, the Presbyterians, and smaller sects who were excluded in New England and in the South got together for their own protection.Collection: Virginia
You hear that liberalism lacks an idea of the common good, but I think that's a mistake.Collection: Mistake
When the basic structure of society is publicly known to satisfy its principles for an extended period of time, those subject to these arrangements tend to develop a desire to act in accordance with these principles and to do their part in institutions which exemplify themCollection: Desire
The only thing that permits us to acquiesce in an erroneous theory is the lack of a better one, analogously, an injustice is tolerable only when it is necessary to avoid an even greater injustice.Collection: Justice
There are infinitely many variations of the initial situation and therefore no doubt indefinitely many theorems of moral geometry.Collection: Doubt
A political conception covers the right to vote, the political virtues, and the good of political life, but it doesn't intend to cover anything else.Collection: Political
The claims of existing social arrangements and of self interest have been duly allowed for. We cannot at the end count them a second time because we do not like the result.Collection: Self
Different political views, even if they're all liberal, in the sense of supporting liberal constitutional democracy, undoubtedly have some notion of the common good in the form of the means provided to assure that people can make use of their liberties, and the like.Collection: Mean
People can make arguments from the Bible if they want to. But I want them to see that they should also give arguments that all reasonable citizens might agree to.Collection: People
A comprehensive doctrine, either religious or secular, aspires to cover all of life. I mean, if it's a religious doctrine, it talks about our relation to God and the universe; it has an ordering of all the virtues, not only political virtues but moral virtues as well, including the virtues of private life, and the rest. Now we may feel philosophically that it doesn't really cover everything, but it aims to cover everything, and a secular doctrine does also.Collection: Religious
At best the principles that economists have supposed the choices of rational individuals to satisfy can be presented as guidelines for us to consider when we make our decisions.Collection: Choices
The idea of public reason has to do with how questions should be decided, but it doesn't tell you what are the good reasons or correct decisions.Collection: Ideas
A scheme is unjust when the higher expectations, one or more of them, are excessive. If these expectations were decreased, the situation of the less favored would be improved.Collection: Expectations
The hazards of the generalized prisoner's dilemma are removed by the match between the right and the good.Collection: Hazards
The concept of justice I take to be defined, then, by the role of its principles in assigning rights and duties and in defining the appropriate division of social advantages. A conception of justice is an interpretation of this role.Collection: Rights
An intuitionist conception of justice is, one might say, but half a conception.Collection: Justice
Ideally a just constitution would be a just procedure arranged to insure a just outcome.Collection: Would Be
The question is, we have a particular problem. How many religions are there in the United States? How are they going to get on together? One way, which has been the usual way historically, is to fight it out, as in France in the sixteenth century. That's a possibility.Collection: Fighting
First of all, principles should be general. That is, it must be possible to formulate them without use of what would be intuitively recognized as proper names, or rigged definite descriptions.Collection: Names
Peace surely is a good reason, yes. But there are other reasons too.Collection: Reason