Since it appeared in 1971, John Rawls's A Theory of Justice has become a classic. The author has now revised the original edition to clear up a number of difficulties he and others have found in the original book. Rawls aims to express an essential part of the common core of the democratic tradition--justice as fairness--and to provide an alternative to utilitarianism, which had dominated the Anglo-Saxon tradition of political thought since the nineteenth century. Rawls substitutes the ideal of the (...) social contract as a more satisfactory account of the basic rights and liberties of citizens as free and equal persons. "Each person," writes Rawls, "possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override." Advancing the ideas of Rousseau, Kant, Emerson, and Lincoln, Rawls's theory is as powerful today as it was when first published. (shrink)

Though the Revised Edition of A Theory of Justice, published in 1999, is the definitive statement of Rawlsıs view, so much of the extensive literature on ...

This was scanned from the 1909 edition and mechanically checked against a commercial copy of the text from CDROM. Differences were corrected against the paper edition. The text itself is thus a highly accurate rendition. The footnotes were entered manually.

When may someone complain, morally? And what, if any, is the relationship between legitimate moral complaint and one's own behaviour? I point out a perplexity about a certain class of moral complaints. Two very different conceptions of moral complaint seem to be operating, and they often have contrary implications. Moreover, both seem intuitively compelling. This is theoretically and practically troubling, but has not been sufficiently noticed. The Paradox of Moral Complaint seems to point to an inherent difficulty in our reflective (...) moral intuitions. Given the legislative nature of moral agency, the plausible limitations upon reasonable moral complaint seem to contradict the inviolability of central moral constraints and the complaints they allow. In the sort of cases under discussion, morality seems at once both to insist upon the possibility of moral complaint, and to deny it. (Published Online August 21 2006). (shrink)