Top 79 Quotes & Sayings by 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.

In constant pursuit of money to finance campaigns, the political system is simply unable to function. Its deliberative powers are paralyzed.

Ideally citizens are to think of themselves as if they were legislators and ask themselves what statutes, supported by what reasons satisfying the criterion of reciprocity, they would think is most reasonable to enact.

The bad man desires arbitrary power. What moves the evil man is the love of injustice.

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

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

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

Justice is the first virtue of social institutions.

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.

I live in a country where 90 or 95 percent of the people profess to be religious, and maybe they are religious, though my experience of religion suggests that very few people are actually religious in more than a conventional sense.

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.

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

Justice as fairness provides what we want.

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.

Ideal legislators do not vote their interests.

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.

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

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.

A political conception covers the right to vote, the political virtues, and the good of political life, but it doesn't intend to cover anything else.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

The naturally advantaged are not to gain merely because they are more gifted, but only to cover the costs of training and education and for using their endowments in ways that help the less fortunate as well.

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

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.

The fairest rules are those to which everyone would agree if they did not know how much power they would have.

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.

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

The sense of justice is continuous with the love of mankind.

Any comprehensive doctrine, religious or secular, can be introduced into any political argument at any time, but I argue that people who do this should also present what they believe are public reasons for their argument. So their opinion is no longer just that of one particular party, but an opinion that all members of a society might reasonably agree to, not necessarily that they would agree to. What's important is that people give the kinds of reasons that can be understood and appraised apart from their particular comprehensive doctrines.

If A were not allowed his better position, B would be even worse off than he is.

The idea of public reason isn't about the right answers to all these questions, but about the kinds of reasons that they ought to be answered by.

A just system must generate its own support.

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

Man is a historical being : The realisations of the powers of human individuals living at any one time takes the cooperation of many generations (or even societies) over a long period of time. By contrast with humankind, every individual animal can and does do what for the most part it might do, or what any other of its kind might or can do that lives at the same time.

Religious faith is an important aspect of American culture and a fact of American political life.

How did Madison get separation through Virginia and later Congress? The Baptists, the Presbyterians, and the smaller sects hated Jefferson; to them he was a secularist of the worst kind. But Madison could get Jefferson's bill passed because the Baptists, the Presbyterians, and smaller sects who were excluded in New England and in the South got together for their own protection.

You might say that, if citizens are acting for the right reasons in a constitutional regime, then regardless of their comprehensive doctrines they want every other citizen to have justice. So you might say they're all working together to do one thing, namely to make sure every citizen has justice. Now that's not the only interest they all have, but it's the single thing they're all trying to do. In my language, they've striving toward one single end, the end of justice for all citizens.

People can make arguments from the Bible if they want to. But I want them to see that they should also give arguments that all reasonable citizens might agree to.

Different political views, even if they're all liberal, in the sense of supporting liberal constitutional democracy, undoubtedly have some notion of the common good in the form of the means provided to assure that people can make use of their liberties, and the like.

An injustice is tolerable only when it is necessary to avoid an even greater injustice.

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.

[E]ach person is to have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with a similar liberty for others.

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.

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.

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

Justice is happiness according to virtue.

Now the good of political life is a great political good. It is not a secular good specified by a comprehensive doctrine like those of Kant or Mill. You could characterize this political good as the good of free and equal citizens recognizing the duty of civility to one another: the duty to give citizens public reasons for one's political actions.

There are two kinds of comprehensive doctrines, religious and secular. Those of religious faith will say I give a veiled argument for secularism, and the latter will say I give a veiled argument for religion. I deny both. Each side presumes the basic ideas of constitutional democracy, so my suggestion is that we can make our political arguments in terms of public reason. Then we stand on common ground. That's how we can understand each other and cooperate.

It is of first importance that the military be subordinate to civilian government

If you compare the United States with Europe, my view is that what happened in Europe is that the church became deeply distrusted by people, because it sided with the monarchs. It instituted the Inquisition and became part of the repressive state apparatus. That never happened here. We don't have that history.

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

A just society is a society that if you knew everything about it, you'd be willing to enter it in a random place.

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

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

The good of political life is the good of free and equal citizens recognizing the duty of civility to one another and supporting the institutions of a constitutional regime.

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.