"This means society should build what Rawls calls an 'infrastructure of justice' that ensures everyone has access to key primary goods - some reasonable level of income and material wellbeing, opportunity and basic rights and liberties - which allow them to consider they have been given a proper chance to achieve full membership of society. Moreover, the rich must recognise that their incomes can only be allowed to reach the level consistent with ensuring that the position of the poor is the best it could possibly be, so that were the positions to be swapped, the rich could accept their reduced position as fair."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Academics from the United StatesPhilosophers from the United StatesEssayists from the United StatesNon-fiction authors from the United StatesLogicians from the United States
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
, Essential truths of a fair-minded man, The Observer, 1 December 2002.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Rawls
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
John Rawls
John Bordley Rawls (21 February 1921 – 24 November 2002) was an American philosopher, and a leading figure in moral and political philosophy. He held the James Bryant Conant University Professorship at Harvard University and the Fulbright Fellowship at Christ Church, Oxford. His magnum opus, A Theory of Justice (1971), was hailed at the time of its publication as "the most important work in moral philosophy since the end of World War II, and is now regarded as one of the primary texts in politic
77 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by John Rawls →
Related Quotes
"John Rawls's argument that all are equally worthy of self-esteem "is almost a parody of this tendency, writing hundre…"
"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 lim…"
"An intuitionist conception of justice is, one might say, but half a conception."
"Essentially the fault lies in the fact that the democratic political process is at best regulated rivalry; it does no…"
"The fundamental criterion for judging any procedure is the justice of its likely results."
"The intolerant can be viewed as free-riders, as persons who seek the advantages of just institutions while not doing …"
"There is a divergence between private and social accounting that the market fails to register. One essential task of …"
"Justice does not require that men must stand idly by while others destroy the basis of their existence."
"We may suppose that everyone has in himself the whole form of a moral conception."