A Theory of Justice
Language: English
Pages: 560
ISBN: 0674000781
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Since it appeared in 1971, John Rawls's A Theory of Justice has become a classic. The author has now revised the original edition to clear up a number of difficulties he and others have found in the original book.
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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these claims. This weighting, however, is normally influenced by the demands of different social interests and so by relative positions of power and influence. It may not, therefore, conform to any one’s conception of a fair wage. This is particularly likely to be true since persons with different interests are likely to stress the criteria which advance their ends. Those with more ability and education are prone to emphasize the claims of skill and training, whereas those lacking these advantages
about society that, if they were sound, would allow the parties to arrive at objective estimates of equal probability. To see this one can convert an argument of Edgeworth for the classical principle into one for average utility.27 In fact, his reasoning can be adjusted to support nearly any general standard of policy. Edgeworth’s idea is to formulate certain reasonable assumptions under which it would be rational for self-interested parties to agree to the standard of utility as a political
treating men as ends in themselves implies at the 31. See The Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, pp. 427–430 of vol. IV of Kants Gesammelten Schriften, Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften (Berlin, 1913), where the second formulation of the categorical imperative is introduced. 156 29. Main Grounds for the Two Principles very least treating them in accordance with the principles to which they would consent in an original position of equality. For in this situation men have equal
the same things. This possibility is not ruled out by the ideal observer definition. Since this definition makes no specific psychological assumptions about the impartial spectator, it yields no principles to account for his approvals under ideal conditions. One who accepts this definition is free to accept justice as fairness for this purpose: one simply allows that an ideal observer would approve of social systems to the extent that they satisfy the two principles of justice. There is an essential
system in proportion to the net sum of pleasure felt by those affected by it. The strength of his approval corresponds to, or measures, the amount of satisfaction in the society surveyed. Therefore his expressions of approval will be given according to the classical principle of utility. To be sure, as Hume observes, sympathy is not a strong feeling. Not only is self-interest likely to inhibit the frame of mind in which we experience it, but self-interest tends to override its dictates in