Sublime

Rawls’s case for the priority of the right over the good reflects the conviction that a “moral person is a subject with ends he has chosen.”30 As moral agents, we are defined not by our ends but by our capacity for choice. “It is not our aims that primarily reveal our nature” but rather the framework of rights we would choose if we could abstract f

People are not monads. A real, live human self is always already partial to certain, select others. Morality needs to take this essential fact about human selfhood into account rather than pretend to override it.

Una questione di giustizia sostanziale. Ma l’espressione «giustizia sostanziale» non significa niente. O meglio: è un sinonimo di arbitrio. Ho sempre pensato che la giustizia esista solo nel sistema delle regole e fin qui avevo cercato di attenermi a questo principio: non si imbroglia per vincere un processo, e in generale non si imbroglia nella vi

Does a just society seek to promote the virtue of its citizens? Or should law be neutral toward competing conceptions of virtue, so that citizens can be free to choose for themselves the best way to live?

Government, he explains, has a “threefold right and duty”: first, to adjudicate disputes between spheres, “compel[ling] mutual regard for the boundary-lines of each”; second, to defend the weak against the strong within each sphere; third, to exercise the coercive power necessary to guarantee that citizens “bear personal and financial burdens for t

We think that human beings, at least in ethical theory, all have equal rights, and that justice involves equality; Aristotle thinks that justice involves, not equality, but right proportion, which is only sometimes equality