Sources & Extracts

Review this excerpt and then go back to the main thread.

In the final section of A Theory of Justice, Rawls offers an overview of what he has attempted to do. The discussion among our speakers has concentrated on the first part of Rawls' book. Rawls' overview applies to the work as a whole.

The three parts of the exposition of this theory are intended to make a unified whole by supporting one another in roughly the following way. The first part presents the essentials of the theoretical structure, and the principles of justice are argued for on the basis of reasonable stipulations concerning the choice of such conceptions. I urged the naturalness of these conditions and presented reasons why they are accepted, but it was not claimed that they are self-evident, or required by the analysis of moral concepts or the meaning of ethical terms. In the second part I examined the sorts of institutions that justice enjoins and the kinds of duties and obligations it imposes on individuals. The aim throughout was to show that the theory proposed matches the fixed points of our considered convictions better than other familiar doctrines, and that it leads us to revise and extrapolate our judgments in what seem on reflection to be more satisfactory ways. First principles and particular judgments appear on balance to hang together reasonably well, at least in comparison with alternative theories. Finally we check to see in third part if justice as fairness is a feasible conception. This forced us to raise the question of stability and whether the right and the good as defined are congruent. These considerations do not determine the initial acknowledgment of principles in the first part of the argument, but confirm it.... [Theory, section 87]