Rent 9780674005112 | Justice As Fairness: A Restatement

Summary Table of Contents Author Biography

This book originated as lectures for a course on political philosophy that Rawls taught regularly at Harvard in the 1980s. In time the lectures became a restatement of his theory of justice as fairness, revised in light of his more recent papers and his treatise Political Liberalism (1993). As Rawls writes in the preface, the restatement presents "in one place an account of justice as fairness as I now see it, drawing on all [my previous] works." He offers a broad overview of his main lines of thought and also explores specific issues never before addressed in any of his writings. Rawls is well aware that since the publication of A Theory of Justice in 1971, American society has moved farther away from the idea of justice as fairness. Yet his ideas retain their power and relevance to debates in a pluralistic society about the meaning and theoretical viability of liberalism. This book demonstrates that moral clarity can be achieved even when a collective commitment to justice is uncertain.

Editor's Foreword

Preface

PART I Fundamental Ideas

(38)

Four Roles of Political Philosophy

(4)

... MORE

Society as a Fair System of Cooperation

(3)

The Idea of a Well-Ordered Society

(2)

The Idea of the Basic Structure

(2)

Limits to Our Inquiry

(2)

The Idea of the Original Position

(4)

The Idea of Free and Equal Persons

(6)

Relations between the Fundamental Ideas

(2)

The Idea of Public Justification

(3)

The Idea of Reflective Equilibrium

(3)

The Idea of an Overlapping Consensus

(7)

PART II Principles of Justice

(41)

Three Basic Points

(3)

Two Principles of Justice

(8)

The Problem of Distributive Justice

(2)

The Basic Structure as Subject: First Kind of Reason

(3)

The Basic Structure as Subject: Second Kind of Reason

(2)

Who Are the Least Advantaged?

(4)

The Difference Principle: Its Meaning

(5)

Objections via Counterexamples

(6)

Legitimate Expectations, Entitlement, and Desert

(2)

On Viewing Native Endowments as a Common Asset

(3)

Summary Comments on Distributive Justice and Desert

(3)

PART III The Argument from the Original Position

(55)

The Original Position: The Set-Up

(4)

The Circumstances of Justice

(1)

Formal Constraints and the Veil of Ignorance

(4)

The Idea of Public Reason

(5)

First Fundamental Comparison

(3)

The Structure of the Argument and the Maximin Rule

(4)

The Argument Stressing the Third Condition

101

(3)

The Priority of the Basic Liberties

104

(2)

An Objection about Aversion to Uncertainty

106

(5)

The Equal Basic Liberties Revisited

111

(4)

The Argument Stressing the Second Condition

115

(4)

Second Fundamental Comparison: Introduction

119

(1)

Grounds Falling under Publicity

120

(2)

Grounds Falling under Reciprocity

122

(2)

Grounds Falling under Stability

124

(2)

Grounds against the Principle of Restricted Utility

126

(4)

Comments on Equality

130

(2)

Concluding Remarks

132

(3)

PART IV Institutions of a Just Basic Structure

135

(45)

Property-Owning Democracy: Introductory Remarks

135

(3)

Some Basic Contrasts between Regimes

138

(2)

Ideas of the Good in Justice as Fairness

140

(5)

Constitutional versus Procedural Democracy

145

(3)

The Fair Value of the Equal Political Liberties

148

(2)

Denial of the Fair Value for Other Basic Liberties

150

(3)

Political and Comprehensive Liberalism: A Contrast

153

(4)

A Note on Head Taxes and the Priority of Liberty

157

(1)

Economic Institutions of a Property-Owning Democracy

158

(4)

The Family as a Basic Institution

162

(6)

The Flexibility of an Index of Primary Goods

168

(8)

Addressing Marx's Critique of Liberalism

176

(3)

Brief Comments on Leisure Time

179

(1)

PART V The Question of Stability

180

(23)

The Domain of the Political

180

(4)

The Question of Stability

184

(4)

Is Justice as Fairness Political in the Wrong Way?

188

(1)

How Is Political Liberalism Possible?

189

(3)

An Overlapping Consensus Not Utopian

192

(3)

A Reasonable Moral Psychology

195

(3)

The Good of Political Society

198

(5)

Index

203

Jonn Rawls is James Bryant Conant University Professor, Emeritus, at Harvard University Erin Kelly is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University

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Justice As Fairness: A Restatement

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