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The fault of the utilitarian doctrine is that it mistakes impersonality for impartiality.

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
Mistakes
Mistake
Impersonality
Impartiality
Utilitarian
Fault
Doctrine
Faults

More quotes by John Rawls

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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.
John Rawls
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Citizens can have their own grounding in their comprehensive doctrines, whatever they happen to be.
John Rawls
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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.
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There are various ways you might define the common good, but that would be one way you could do it.
John Rawls
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The principles of justice are chosen behind a veil of ignorance.
John Rawls
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An intuitionist conception of justice is, one might say, but half a conception.
John Rawls
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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.
John Rawls
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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
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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
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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.
John Rawls
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An injustice is tolerable only when it is necessary to avoid an even greater injustice.
John Rawls
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The fundamental criterion for judging any procedure is the justice of its likely results.
John Rawls
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The extreme nature of dominant-end views is often concealed by the vagueness and ambiguity of the end proposed.
John Rawls
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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 them
John Rawls
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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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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
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You hear that liberalism lacks an idea of the common good, but I think that's a mistake.
John Rawls
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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
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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.
John Rawls
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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.
John Rawls