The concept of freedom (or liberty – he doesn’t distinguish the two) is central to Rawls’s theory of justice at a number of levels. On the first page of A Theory of Justice, anticipating the priority that he gives to his first principle of justice over his second, as well as his critique of utilitarianism, Rawls asserts that “justice denies that the loss of freedom for some is made right by a greater good shared by others” (TJ 3). At the start of Political Liberalism, he orients his project by noting the apparent conlict between the ideals of freedom and equality (PL 4), and later he claims that “the point” of developing justice as fairness is to try to resolve this “impasse in our recent political history” (PL 300). He also notes the dispute concerning the proper understanding of liberty itself by pointing to the conlict