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Public reason arguments can be good or bad just like other arguments.

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
Reason
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More quotes by John Rawls

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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.
John Rawls
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The fairest rules are those to which everyone would agree if they did not know how much power they would have.
John Rawls
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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.
John Rawls
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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.
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.
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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Clearly when the liberties are left unrestricted they collide with one another.
John Rawls
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Justice as fairness provides what we want.
John Rawls
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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.
John Rawls
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The principles of justice are chosen behind a veil of ignorance.
John Rawls
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There are infinitely many variations of the initial situation and therefore no doubt indefinitely many theorems of moral geometry.
John Rawls
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Justice is the first virtue of social institutions.
John Rawls
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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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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
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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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The fault of the utilitarian doctrine is that it mistakes impersonality for impartiality.
John Rawls
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Many of our most serious conflicts are conflicts within ourselves. Those who suppose their judgements are always consistent are unreflective or dogmatic.
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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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