Free and Equal: A Manifesto for a Just Society

The problem here is not with the notion of civility itself, but with a narrow conception of what it entails. For Rawls, the “duty of civility” is not only, or even mainly, about style. It is also about substance: when it comes to politics, we should do our best to ensure that the positions we advocate lie within the boundaries of public reason—in o

Rawls explicitly rejected “welfare state capitalism,” arguing that we cannot create a fair economy through redistribution alone. As we have seen, the difference principle is concerned not just with income and wealth, but with inequalities of economic power and control and of opportunities for self-respect; and this broad perspective, in turn, point

In order to be fair, these decisions must also be made in a context where men and women have genuinely equal opportunities: there is nothing fair about a situation in which women “choose” to take on the bulk of unpaid care work because they face discrimination at work or in education, as has so often been the case.

Rawls’s Two Principles of Justice First principle: Each person has an equal claim to a fully adequate scheme of equal basic rights and liberties, which scheme is compatible with the same scheme for all; and in this scheme the equal political liberties, and only those liberties, are to be guaranteed their fair value.

In philosophical circles, Rawls’s approach is described as asserting the “priority of the right over the good.” On this view, our rights define a framework within which we can each pursue our beliefs about how to live; in contrast to the alternative, where we start with a particular conception of the good, and design rights in order to promote it.

A “market,” after all, is simply a space in which people are free to buy and sell things, and this freedom of exchange is valuable in its own right.

For Rawls, however, “ideal theory” was always a precursor to “non-ideal theory”: whereas the former defines the goal, the latter “asks how this long-term goal might be achieved, or worked towards, usually in gradual steps.”[60] We need ideal theory because without a clear target to work towards, however remote, we are always in danger of merely twe

The result is a paradoxical sense of stasis—paradoxical because there is a real appetite for change; and, for better or worse, some kind of change seems all but inevitable.

putting values centre stage is not empty idealism, but an essential part of any serious political strategy, since they provide the glue that can bind disparate groups together.