For modern liberal societies the primary value of the political order must be the neutrality of the state. The fundamental political principles by which all are to live must be justifiable without appeal to the intrinsic superiority of any controversial ideal of the good life. Now such principles will assign to persons rights and duties having to do with how the advantages of social cooperation are to be distributed among them. They are therefore principles of justice. By virtue of their neutrality, liberal principles of justice embody one instance of Kant's claim that the right must be prior to the good. Principles of justice must be justifiable antecedently to disputed notions of the good life. For two reasons, however, this similarity to Kantianism should not be pressed too far. Political neutrality need not be absolute, as Kant intended his principle to be: It need extend only to controversial ideals of the good life, and not to those that are shared. Just as importantly, the priority of the right over the good, as I have so far explained it, is a political ideal. Nothing has been said to imply that this priority must extend to the whole of morality, as Kant believed it did. In particular, nothing I have said should imply that in our personal ideals, in our ideals of what we should be as persons outside the political realm, we must have a greater allegiance to neutrality than to our own conception of the good life.