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Justice is the first virtue of social institutions.
John Rawls
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John Rawls
Age: 81 †
Born: 1921
Born: February 21
Died: 2002
Died: November 24
Pedagogue
Philosopher
Political Scientist
University Teacher
Baltimore
Maryland
Rawls
John Bordley Rawls
Institutions
Virtue
Justice
Social
Firsts
First
More quotes by John Rawls
We must choose for others as we have reason to believe they would choose for themselves if they were at the age of reason and deciding rationally.
John Rawls
Justice as fairness provides what we want.
John Rawls
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.
John Rawls
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.
John Rawls
The idea of public reason isn't about the right answers to all these questions, but about the kinds of reasons that they ought to be answered by.
John Rawls
An intolerant sect has no right to complain when it is denied an equal liberty... A person's right to complain is limited to principles he acknowledges himself.
John Rawls
The strength of the claims of formal justice, of obedience to system, clearly depend upon the substantive justice of institutions and the possibilities of their reform.
John Rawls
The extreme nature of dominant-end views is often concealed by the vagueness and ambiguity of the end proposed.
John Rawls
[E]ach person is to have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with a similar liberty for others.
John Rawls
Many of our most serious conflicts are conflicts within ourselves. Those who suppose their judgements are always consistent are unreflective or dogmatic.
John Rawls
Political philosophy is realistically utopian when it extends what are ordinarily thought to be the limits of practicable political possibility and, in so doing, reconciles us to our political and social condition. Our hope for the future of our society rests on the belief that the social world allows a reasonably just Society of Peoples.
John Rawls
A society regulated by a public sense of justice is inherently stable.
John Rawls
No one deserves his greater natural capacity nor merits a more favorable starting place in society.
John Rawls
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.
John Rawls
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.
John Rawls
An intuitionist conception of justice is, one might say, but half a conception.
John Rawls
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.
John Rawls
Clearly when the liberties are left unrestricted they collide with one another.
John Rawls
You hear that liberalism lacks an idea of the common good, but I think that's a mistake.
John Rawls
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.
John Rawls
