Sublime

Lee Kuan Yew: The state should provide its people with the maximum enjoyment of freedoms and respect the family unit. The state should embrace multiple nations yet demand loyalty

In order to figure out the most fair and equitable way to structure society, he proposed that the designers of said society operate behind a veil of ignorance. This means that they could not know who they would be in the society they were creating. If they designed the society without knowing their economic status, their ethnic background, talents

Individuals with radically different values can agree on the importance of dependency upon others and the need for human association. There is no good life without free and democratically self-governing associations that respect the rule of law, such as trade unions, universities, faith communities, charities, sport clubs and the entire edifice of

Judaism’s “possibilism” about human nature, its conviction that we can choose the good even if we often don’t.

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.

« En démocratie, l’état de la justice est un marqueur extrêmement fiable de l’état des libertés, de l’égalité réelle et de la séparation des pouvoirs », déclare à juste titre la Ligue française des droits de l’homme.

Such a politics is what the English political theorist Bernard Crick calls the conciliation of rival interests in a polity using compromise rather than force. Crick’s conception of politics shifts the focus away from abstractions and ideologies towards the praxis of ‘preserving a community’ that has ‘grown too complicated for either tradition alone

All agree that liberal ideals of freedom, equality, the rule of law, representative government and individual rights can only be defended with the help of social virtues such as fraternity, duty, loyalty, humility and honour.