"In the revisions I made in 1975 I removed certain weaknesses in the original edition. These I shall now try to indicate, although I am afraid much of what I say will not be intelligible without some prior knowledge of the text. Leaving this concern aside, one of the most serious weaknesses was in the account of liberty, the defects of which were pointed out by H. L. A. Hart in his critical discussion of 1973. Beginning with §11, I made revisions to clear up several of the difficulties Hart noted. It must be said, however, that the account in the revised text, although considerably improved, is still not fully satisfactory. A better version is found in a later essay of 1982 entitled “The Basic Liberties and Their Priority.”3 This essay attempts to answer what I came to regard as Hart’s most important objections. The basic rights and liberties and their priority are there said to guarantee equally for all citizens the social conditions essential for the adequate development and the full and informed exercise of their two moral powers—their capacity for a sense of justice and their capacity for a conception of the good—in what I call the two fundamental cases."
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A Theory of Justice
A Theory of Justice is a work of political philosophy and ethics by John Rawls. It was originally published in 1971 and revised in both 1975 (for the translated editions) and 1999.
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