As free persons, citizens recognize one another as having the moral power to have a conception of the good. This means that they do not view themselves as inevitably tied to the pursuit of the particular conception of the good and its final ends which they espouse at any given time.
The bad man desires arbitrary power. What moves the evil man is the love of injustice.
A just society is a society that if you knew everything about it, you’d be willing to enter it in a random place.
The fairest rules are those to which everyone would agree if they did not know how much power they would have.
The natural distribution is neither just nor unjust; nor is it unjust that persons are born into society at some particular position. These are simply natural facts. What is just and unjust is the way that institutions deal with these facts.
Justice is happiness according to virtue.
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.
In all sectors of society there should be roughly equal prospects of culture and achievement for everyone similarly motivated and endowed. The expectations of those with the same abilities and aspirations should not be affected by their social class.
A society regulated by a public sense of justice is inherently stable.
An injustice is tolerable only when it is necessary to avoid an even greater injustice.
The sense of justice is continuous with the love of mankind.
In constant pursuit of money to finance campaigns, the political system is simply unable to function. Its deliberative powers are paralyzed.
Properly understood, then, the desire to act justly derives in part from the desire to express most fully what we are or can be, namely free and equal rational beings with the liberty to choose.
The fault of the utilitarian doctrine is that it mistakes impersonality for impartiality.
The naturally advantaged are not to gain merely because they are more gifted, but only to cover the costs of training and education and for using their endowments in ways that help the less fortunate as well.
Thus I assume that to each according to his threat advantage is not a conception of justice.
The intolerant can be viewed as free-riders, as persons who seek the advantages of just institutions while not doing their share to uphold them.
The extreme nature of dominant-end views is often concealed by the vagueness and ambiguity of the end proposed.
Ideal legislators do not vote their interests.