John Rawls is Professor Emeritus at Harvard University. He is the author of the well-known and path breaking A Theory of Justice (Harvard, 1971) and the more recent work Political Liberalism (Columbia, 1996). These excerpts from A Theory of Justice provide a skeletal account of Rawls's project of using social contract theory to generate principles of justice for assigning basic rights and dutie...

Kantian political philosophies stress that a state ought to be “neutral” (Rawls), “minimal” (Nozick), or “public” (Ripstein’s Kant), as part of its duty respect citizens’ freedom pursue whatever ends these citizens find valuable. States are under merely secure independence from each other and the state. In contrast, morality contends individuals subject certain “obligatory” ends, viz., emerge i...

The paper explores theoretical shortcomings in the egalitarian theory by John Rawls and provides a complementary view on the problem of morally arbitrary contingencies. The conception of natural lottery, which Rawls presents to signify the starting range of morally arbitrary inequalities, falls short in philosophical grounding. According to critics, the notion of natural lottery appeals to the ...

T. M. Scanlon I first began thinking of contractualism as a moral theory 38 years ago, in May of 1979. The idea was not entirely original. I was of course familiar with Rawls’ theory of justice, and influenced by it. A more direct source for the idea of justifiability to others as the basis of morality lay in remarks of Tom Nagel’s in Moral Questions. Rawls and Nagel had, perhaps, the wisdom no...

This article encourages accountants to consider their role in the debates concerning social and environmental accounting. It outlines a placement ethic which provides a framework to explore various schools of thought on social and environmental accounting. A placement ethic uses ideas central to Habermas and Rawls to provide a continuum model to explore whether an arbitrated political consensus...

0147-5967/$ see front matter 2013 Association for Comparative Economic Studies Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jce.2013.08.001 ⇑ Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (N.D. Johnson), [email protected] (M. Koyama). 1 See for instance Finke (1991) and Nussbaum (2008) on the First Amendment and Kamen (1967), Head (1998), Laursen (1999),...

This thesis first critically analyzes John Rawls’s second principle of justice as a democratic conception of equality and the challenge posed to that conception by Ronald Dworkin’s ‘Equality of Resources.’ Democratic equality is defended over luck egalitarianism as an articulation of liberal egalitarianism. However, where Rawls deems social primary goods to be unconditionally regulated by insti...

In Australia, Japan, Sweden, and Switzerland, the average life expectancy is now greater than 80 years. But in Angola, Malawi, Sierra Leone, and Zimbabwe, the average life expectancy is less than 40 years. The situation is even worse than these statistics suggest because average figures tend to mask inequalities within countries. What are we to make of a world with such inequal health prospects...