John Rawls Quotes

79 Sourced Quotes

Liberal constitutional democracy is supposed to ensure that each citizen is free and equal and protected by basic rights and liberties.

John Rawls
Of course, we know that not everyone agrees with assisted suicide, but people might agree that one has the right to it, even if they're not themselves going to exercise it.

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

John Rawls
I'm concerned about the survival, historically, of constitutional democracy.

John Rawls
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
The strength of the claims of formal justice, of obedience to system, clearly depend upon the substantive justice of institutions and the possibilities of their reform.

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

John Rawls
The only thing that permits us to acquiesce in an erroneous theory is the lack of a better one, analogously, an injustice is tolerable only when it is necessary to avoid an even greater injustice.

John Rawls
A society regulated by a public sense of justice is inherently stable.

John Rawls
The idea of public reason has to do with how questions should be decided, but it doesn't tell you what are the good reasons or correct decisions.

John Rawls
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
Peace surely is a good reason, yes. But there are other reasons too.

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

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

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

John Rawls
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
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.

John Rawls
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.

John Rawls
The first statement of the two principals reads as follows. First: each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with a similar liberty for others. Second: social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both (a) reasonably expected to be to everyone's advantage, and (b) attached to positions and offices open to all.

John Rawls
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.

John Rawls
Ideally a just constitution would be a just procedure arranged to insure a just outcome.

John Rawls
An intuitionist conception of justice is, one might say, but half a conception.

John Rawls
We may suppose that everyone has in himself the whole form of a moral conception.

John Rawls
Indeed, it is tempting to suppose that it is self evident that things should be so arranged so as to lead to the most good.

John Rawls
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.

John Rawls
I am particularly grateful to Nozick for his unfailing help and encouragement during the last stages.

John Rawls
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.

John Rawls
Greater intelligence, wealth and opportunity, for example, allow a person to achieve ends he could not rationally contemplate otherwise.

John Rawls
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
Many of our most serious conflicts are conflicts within ourselves. Those who suppose their judgements are always consistent are unreflective or dogmatic.

John Rawls