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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

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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.
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Justice as fairness provides what we want.
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There are infinitely many variations of the initial situation and therefore no doubt indefinitely many theorems of moral geometry.
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If you compare the United States with Europe, my view is that what happened in Europe is that the church became deeply distrusted by people, because it sided with the monarchs. It instituted the Inquisition and became part of the repressive state apparatus. That never happened here. We don't have that history.
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The fundamental criterion for judging any procedure is the justice of its likely results.
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Clearly when the liberties are left unrestricted they collide with one another.
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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.
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There is a divergence between private and social accounting that the market fails to register. One essential task of law and government is to institute the necessary conditions.
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The principles of justice are chosen behind a veil of ignorance.
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The sense of justice is continuous with the love of mankind.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Liberal constitutional democracy is supposed to ensure that each citizen is free and equal and protected by basic rights and liberties.
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I live in a country where 90 or 95 percent of the people profess to be religious, and maybe they are religious, though my experience of religion suggests that very few people are actually religious in more than a conventional sense.
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A political conception just applies to the basic structure of a society, its institutions, constitutional essentials, matters of basic justice and property, and so on.
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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.
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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.
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An intuitionist conception of justice is, one might say, but half a conception.
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The extreme nature of dominant-end views is often concealed by the vagueness and ambiguity of the end proposed.
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