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

Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought. A theory however elegant and economical must be rejected or revised if it is untrue; likewise laws and institutions no matter how efficient and well-arranged must be reformed or abolished if they are unjust.

Citizens can have their own grounding in their comprehensive doctrines, whatever they happen to be.

Properly understood, then, the desire to act justly derives in part from the desire to express most fully what we are or can be, namely free and equal rational beings with the liberty to choose.

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.

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.

No one deserves his greater natural capacity nor merits a more favorable starting place in society.