The article deals with two arguments used by Gerald Cohen in his critique of the justice incentives that, according to most common interpretation, are admitted John Rawls’s conception – particular, difference principle. One such argument is what anticipates response basic structure objection, objection which criticism runs up against limit that Rawls himself imposes on applicability principles ...

Rawls is one of the most important philosophers in American and Western thought 20th century. His main theoretical contributions are reappropriation social contract natural law doctrines political philosophy, a comprehensive exposition his basic theory "justice as fairness," profound criticism utilitarianism. The two principles justice that he repeatedly discusses highlight equality citizens sh...

This essay challenges the view that John Rawls’s recently published undergraduate thesis A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith provides little help in understanding his mature work. Two crucial strands of Rawls’s Theory of Justice are its critique of teleology and its claims about our moral nature and its expression. These strands are brought together in a set of arguments late in T...

What is a just society? How to distribute limited resources, opportunities, access, guarantees, and so forth, to members of a community who are of vastly different natural and acquired capacities? Perhaps the most promising approach to an answer is that suggested by John Rawls. Rawls’ famous thoughtexperiment, in A Theory of Justice – the invitation to take up the perspective of “the original p...

In 1980, the liberal political philosopher John Rawls delivered a remarkable series of lectures at Columbia University. The Dewey Lectures, subsequently published in the Journal of Philosophy as “Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory,” detailed a metaethical procedure–or method for formulating principles–that informed his earlier A Theory of Justice (1971) and that would make possible its sequ...