John Rawls - Persons Quotes

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

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
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.

John Rawls
The perspective of eternity is not a perspective from a certain place beyond the world, nor the point of view of a transcendent being; rather it is a certain form of thought and feeling that rational persons can adopt within the world... Purity of heart, if one could attain it, would be to see clearly and to act with grace and self-command from this point of view.

John Rawls
Each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override.

John Rawls
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.

John Rawls
I have assumed throughout that the persons in the original position are rational.

John Rawls
That persons have opposing interests and seek to advance their own conception of the good is not at all the same thing as their being moved by envy and jealousy.

John Rawls