John Rawls Quotes
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Justice does not require that men must stand idly by while others destroy the basis of their existence.
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Ideally a just constitution would be a just procedure arranged to insure a just outcome.
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The difference principle, for example, requires that the higher expectations of the more advantaged contribute to the prospects of the least advantaged.
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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.
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Our concern is solely with the basic structure of society and its major institutions and therefore with the standard cases of social justice.
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The fundamental criterion for judging any procedure is the justice of its likely results.
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Essentially the fault lies in the fact that the democratic political process is at best regulated rivalry; it does not even in theory have the desirable properties that price theory ascribes to truly competitive markets.
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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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Justice is happiness according to virtue.
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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.
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The claims of existing social arrangements and of self interest have been duly allowed for. We cannot at the end count them a second time because we do not like the result.
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We may suppose that everyone has in himself the whole form of a moral conception.
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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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In constant pursuit of money to finance campaigns, the political system is simply unable to function. Its deliberative powers are paralyzed.
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The bad man desires arbitrary power. What moves the evil man is the love of injustice.
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The concept of justice I take to be defined, then, by the role of its principles in assigning rights and duties and in defining the appropriate division of social advantages. A conception of justice is an interpretation of this role.
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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.
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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.
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Men resign themselves to their position should it ever occur to them to question it; and since all may view themselves as assigned their vocation, everyone is held to be equally fated and equally noble in the eyes of providence.
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To each according to his threat advantage does not count as a principle of justice.
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An individual who finds that he enjoys seeing others in positions of lesser liberty understands that he has no claim whatever to this enjoyment.
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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.
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The circumstances of justice may be described as the normal conditions under which human cooperation is both possible and necessary.