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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difference principle in a precise way normally requires more information than we can expect to have and, in any case, more than the application of the first principle. It is often perfectly plain and evident when the equal liberties are violated. These violations are not only unjust but can be clearly seen to be unjust: the injustice is manifest in the public structure of institutions. But this state of affairs is comparatively rare with social and economic policies regulated by the difference
logic and mathematics is profoundly altered by the discovery of logical systems illustrating these concepts. Once the substantive content of moral conceptions is better understood, a similar transformation may occur. It is possible that convincing answers to questions of the meaning and justification of moral judgments can be found in no other way. I wish, then, to stress the central place of the study of our substantive moral conceptions. But the corollary to recognizing their complexity is
apply only if special circumstances obtain, these various conditions being exhaustive and mutually exclusive. For example one conception might hold at one stage of culture, a different conception at another. Such a family could be counted as itself a conception of justice; it would consist of a set of ordered pairs, each pair being a conception of justice matched with the circumstances in which it applies. But if conceptions of this kind were added to the list, our problem would become very
their society. A further assumption is that the parties try to advance their conception of the good as best they can, and that in attempting to do this they are not bound by prior moral ties to each other. The question arises, however, whether the persons in the original position have obligations and duties to third parties, for example, to their immediate descendants. To say that they do would be one way of handling questions of justice between generations. However, the aim of justice as
theory of justice in the light of which these assertions can be interpreted and assessed. I shall begin by considering the role of the principles of justice. Let us assume, to fix ideas, that a society is a more or less self-sufficient association of persons who in their relations to one another recognize certain rules of conduct as binding and who for the most part act in accordance with them. Suppose further that these rules specify a system of cooperation designed to advance the good of those