John Rawls Quotes

I have tried to set forth a theory that enables us to understand and to assess these feelings about the primacy of justice. Justice as fairness is the outcome: it articulates these opinions and supports their general tendency.

Ideally citizens are to think of themselves as if they were legislators and ask themselves what statutes, supported by what reasons satisfying the criterion of reciprocity, they would think is most reasonable to enact.

Any comprehensive doctrine, religious or secular, can be introduced into any political argument at any time, but I argue that people who do this should also present what they believe are public reasons for their argument. So their opinion is no longer just that of one particular party, but an opinion that all members of a society might reasonably agree to, not necessarily that they would agree to. What's important is that people give the kinds of reasons that can be understood and appraised apart from their particular comprehensive doctrines.

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.

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.

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.

The fairest rules are those to which everyone would agree if they did not know how much power they would have.

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.

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.

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.

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.

First of all, principles should be general. That is, it must be possible to formulate them without use of what would be intuitively recognized as proper names, or rigged definite descriptions.

You might say that, if citizens are acting for the right reasons in a constitutional regime, then regardless of their comprehensive doctrines they want every other citizen to have justice. So you might say they're all working together to do one thing, namely to make sure every citizen has justice. Now that's not the only interest they all have, but it's the single thing they're all trying to do. In my language, they've striving toward one single end, the end of justice for all citizens.

The naturally advantaged are not to gain merely because they are more gifted, but only to cover the costs of training and education and for using their endowments in ways that help the less fortunate as well.

The fault of the utilitarian doctrine is that it mistakes impersonality for impartiality.

Religious faith is an important aspect of American culture and a fact of American political life.

What's important is that people give the kinds of reasons that can be understood and appraised apart from their particular comprehensive doctrines: for example, that they argue against physician-assisted suicide not just by speculating about God's wrath or the afterlife, but by talking about what they see as assisted suicide's potential injustices.

In constant pursuit of money to finance campaigns, the political system is simply unable to function. Its deliberative powers are paralyzed.

There are infinitely many variations of the initial situation and therefore no doubt indefinitely many theorems of moral geometry.

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.

In all sectors of society there should be roughly equal prospects of culture and achievement for everyone similarly motivated and endowed. The expectations of those with the same abilities and aspirations should not be affected by their social class.

Thus I assume that to each according to his threat advantage is not a conception of justice.

[E]ach person is to have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with a similar liberty for others.

The hazards of the generalized prisoner's dilemma are removed by the match between the right and the good.

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.

The principles of justice are chosen behind a veil of ignorance.

You hear that liberalism lacks an idea of the common good, but I think that's a mistake.

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.

The extreme nature of dominant-end views is often concealed by the vagueness and ambiguity of the end proposed.

It is of first importance that the military be subordinate to civilian government