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At best the principles that economists have supposed the choices of rational individuals to satisfy can be presented as guidelines for us to consider when we make our decisions.

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
Best
Individuals
Make
Decisions
Supposed
Guidelines
Consider
Economists
Principles
Presented
Decision
Economist
Choices
Satisfy
Individual
Rational

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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.
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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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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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Different political views, even if they're all liberal, in the sense of supporting liberal constitutional democracy, undoubtedly have some notion of the common good in the form of the means provided to assure that people can make use of their liberties, and the like.
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The good of political life is the good of free and equal citizens recognizing the duty of civility to one another and supporting the institutions of a constitutional regime.
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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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There are infinitely many variations of the initial situation and therefore no doubt indefinitely many theorems of moral geometry.
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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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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.
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Citizens can have their own grounding in their comprehensive doctrines, whatever they happen to be.
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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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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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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.
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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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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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Public reason arguments can be good or bad just like other arguments.
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The intolerant can be viewed as free-riders, as persons who seek the advantages of just institutions while not doing their share to uphold them.
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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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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.
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