John Rawls Quotes about Justice

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

Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought. A theory however elegant and economical must be rejected or revised if it is untrue; likewise laws and institutions no matter how efficient and well-arranged must be reformed or abolished if they are unjust.

Justice is the first virtue of social institutions.

Justice as fairness provides what we want.

A society regulated by a public sense of justice is inherently stable.

Justice is happiness according to virtue.

The sense of justice is continuous with the love of mankind.

I have tried to set forth a theory that enables us to understand and to assess these feelings about the primacy of justice. Justice as fairness is the outcome: it articulates these opinions and supports their general tendency.

Thus I assume that to each according to his threat advantage is not a conception of justice.

The fundamental criterion for judging any procedure is the justice of its likely results.

The circumstances of justice may be described as the normal conditions under which human cooperation is both possible and necessary.

The strength of the claims of formal justice, of obedience to system, clearly depend upon the substantive justice of institutions and the possibilities of their reform.

The only thing that permits us to acquiesce in an erroneous theory is the lack of a better one, analogously, an injustice is tolerable only when it is necessary to avoid an even greater injustice.

The concept of justice I take to be defined, then, by the role of its principles in assigning rights and duties and in defining the appropriate division of social advantages. A conception of justice is an interpretation of this role.

An intuitionist conception of justice is, one might say, but half a conception.

A political conception just applies to the basic structure of a society, its institutions, constitutional essentials, matters of basic justice and property, and so on.