74 Quotes by John Rawls

To employ the coercive apparatus of the state in order to maintain manifestly unjust institutions is itself a form of illegitimate force that men in due course have a right to resist.

We had occupied those buildings for 31 years, ... Nothing changed as result of the sale except ownership.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.