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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
Whatever
Happens
Grounding
Doctrines
Comprehensive
Doctrine
Citizens
Happen

More quotes by 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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No one deserves his greater natural capacity nor merits a more favorable starting place in society.
John Rawls
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A society regulated by a public sense of justice is inherently stable.
John Rawls
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The sense of justice is continuous with the love of mankind.
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.
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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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Clearly when the liberties are left unrestricted they collide with one another.
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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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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Justice is the first virtue of social institutions.
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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An injustice is tolerable only when it is necessary to avoid an even greater injustice.
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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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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.
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.
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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You hear that liberalism lacks an idea of the common good, but I think that's a mistake.
John Rawls
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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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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.
John Rawls
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The principles of justice are chosen behind a veil of ignorance.
John Rawls