John Rawls
John Rawls
John Bordley Rawlswas an American moral and political philosopher. He held the James Bryant Conant University Professorship at Harvard University and the Fulbright Fellowship at the University of Oxford. Rawls received both the Schock Prize for Logic and Philosophy and the National Humanities Medal in 1999, the latter presented by President Bill Clinton, in recognition of how Rawls's work "helped a whole generation of learned Americans revive their faith in democracy itself."...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEducator
Date of Birth21 February 1921
CountryUnited States of America
Ideal legislators do not vote their interests.
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.
Justice is the first virtue of social institutions,
If A were not allowed his better position, B would be even worse off than he is.
The fundamental criterion for judging any procedure is the justice of its likely results.
Ideally a just constitution would be a just procedure arranged to insure a just outcome.
A just system must generate its own support.
The hazards of the generalized prisoner's dilemma are removed by the match between the right and the good.
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.
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.
[E]ach person is to have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with a similar liberty for others.
Justice as fairness provides what we want.
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
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.