Sublime

There are two kinds of people in the world. Members of more traditional communities tend to assign approximately equal importance to all three moral categories, which he calls “foundations.” But educated Westerners with progressive political views differ. They tend to assign great importance to the first foundation, fairness, and very limited impor

But, for Rawls, the most important comparison was between “justice as fairness”—the name he used to refer collectively to his own principles—and the utilitarianism that dominated political philosophy at the time.

The best-known systems of normative ethics are the one-receptor systems I described in chapter 6: utilitarianism (which tells us to maximize overall welfare) and deontology (which in its Kantian form tells us to make the rights and autonomy of others paramount).

Rawls rejected the notion, associated with many followers of the classical liberal tradition, that freedom of exchange is on a par with, or should even take priority over, personal freedom or political equality.

“The rationalist utopia is a power trip,”

Adam Smith.