Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Does John Rawls’s justice as fairness require virtuous citizens to eschew self-interested motivation in favor of motivation by the aim to promote justice when making decisions about their labor or investment participation in their society’s economy? Analyzing Rawls’s ideas of advantage and of legitimate ends and tracing the purpose and implementation of his difference principle, the article shows how G. A. Cohen’s critique of Rawls’s allowance of productive incentives reflects misunderstandings of Rawls’s theoretical aims and of the fundamental liberalism of Rawls’s well-ordered society. In that society, political civility permits making such decisions by appeal to each citizen’s self-interested aims and values.
Source: The Review of Politics
Author: S. A. Lloyd
Institution: University of Southern California
Language: English
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $3,550
Funder: Universität Regensburg
OpenAlex ID: W4409441896