John Rawls

Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought.

The intuitive idea is that since everyone's well-being depends upon a scheme of cooperation without which no one could have a satisfactory life, the division of advantages should be such as to draw forth the willing cooperation of everyone taking part in it, including those less well off.

Each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override.

In justice as fairness the original position of equality corresponds to the state of nature in the traditional theory of the social contract.

We are not trying to find a theory that explains our considered judgments of justice; we are trying to find a theory that justifies them.

The idea of the original position is to set up a fair procedure so that any principles agreed to will be just.

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

No one knows his place in society, his class position or social status, nor does anyone know his fortune in the distribution of natural assets and abilities, his intelligence, strength, and the like.

The point of the veil of ignorance is to exclude those contingencies that set men at odds and tempt them to exploit social and natural circumstances to their own advantage.

The general conception of justice requires that all social primary goods—liberty and opportunity, income and wealth, and the bases of self-respect—are to be distributed equally unless an unequal distribution of any or all of these goods is to the advantage of the least favored.

The difference principle represents, in effect, an agreement to regard the distribution of natural talents as a common asset and to share in the benefits of this distribution whatever it turns out to be.

The problem of justice in the distribution of wealth and income is a problem of pure procedural justice.

The two principles of justice are lexical order, which means that the first principle has priority over the second.

The basic liberties can be restricted only for the sake of liberty itself.

A just society is a society that respects persons as free and equal, and that protects their fundamental rights and liberties.

The main idea is that society is a cooperative venture for mutual advantage.

The two principles of justice are a special case of a more general conception of justice that can be expressed as follows: All social values—liberty and opportunity, income and wealth, and the bases of self-respect—are to be distributed equally unless an unequal distribution of any, or all, of these values is to everyone's advantage.

The principles of justice are those that free and rational persons concerned to further their own interests would accept in an initial position of equality.

The well-ordered society is a society in which everyone accepts and knows that everyone else accepts the same principles of justice.

The problem of justice is to find principles that can be publicly justified to all members of society.