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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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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
Comprehensive
Doctrine
Citizens
Happen
Whatever
Happens
Grounding
Doctrines

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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 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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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
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You hear that liberalism lacks an idea of the common good, but I think that's a mistake.
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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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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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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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The extreme nature of dominant-end views is often concealed by the vagueness and ambiguity of the end proposed.
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Clearly when the liberties are left unrestricted they collide with one another.
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An injustice is tolerable only when it is necessary to avoid an even greater injustice.
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The sense of justice is continuous with the love of mankind.
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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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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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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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No one deserves his greater natural capacity nor merits a more favorable starting place in society.
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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.
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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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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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