John Rawls Quotes
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In justice as fairness society is interpreted as a cooperative venture for mutual advantage.
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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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Ideally a just constitution would be a just procedure arranged to insure a just outcome.
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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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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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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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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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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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We may suppose that everyone has in himself the whole form of a moral conception.
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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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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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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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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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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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The bad man desires arbitrary power. What moves the evil man is the love of injustice.
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To each according to his threat advantage does not count as a principle of justice.
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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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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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Clearly when the liberties are left unrestricted they collide with one another.
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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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Many conservative writers have contended that the tendency to equality in modern social movements is the expression of envy. In this way they seek to discredit this trend, attributing it to collectively harmful impulses.