John Rawls - A Theory of Justice (1971)

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

John Rawls
Certainly it is wrong to be cruel to animals and the destruction of a whole species can be a great evil. The capacity for feelings of pleasure and pain and for the form of life of which animals are capable clearly impose duties of compassion and humanity in their case.

John Rawls
Being happy involves both a certain achievement in action and a rational assurance about the outcome.

John Rawls
The even larger difference between rich and poor makes the latter even worse off, and this violates the principal of mutual advantage.

John Rawls
We must not be enticed by mathematically attractive assumptions into pretending that the contingencies of men's social positions and the asymmetries of their situations somehow even out in the end. Rather we must choose our conception of justice fully recognizing that this is not and cannot be the case.

John Rawls
It may be expedient but it is not just that some should have less in order that others may prosper.

John Rawls
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.

John Rawls
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.

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 fundamental criterion for judging any procedure is the justice of its likely results.

John Rawls
Clearly when the liberties are left unrestricted they collide with one another.

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

John Rawls
No one deserves his greater natural capacity nor merits a more favorable starting place in society.

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

John Rawls
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.

John Rawls
Our concern is solely with the basic structure of society and its major institutions and therefore with the standard cases of social justice.

John Rawls
The difference principal, for example, requires that the higher expectations of the more advantaged contribute to the prospects of the least advantaged.

John Rawls
A conception of justice cannot be deduced from self evident premises or conditions on principles; instead, its justification is a matter of the mutual support of many considerations, of everything fitted together into one coherent view.

John Rawls
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.

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
The suppression of liberty is always likely to be irrational.

John Rawls
The circumstances of justice may be described as the normal conditions under which human cooperation is both possible and necessary.

John Rawls
When the basic structure of society is publicly known to satisfy its principles for an extended period of time, those subject to these arrangements tend to develop a desire to act in accordance with these principles and to do their part in institutions which exemplify them

John Rawls
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.

John Rawls
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.

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

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