Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Abbreviations for Rawls’s texts
- Introduction
- A
- B
- C
- D
- E
- F
- G
- H
- I
- J
- K
- L
- 109 Law of Peoples
- 110 Law, system of
- 111 Least-advantaged position
- 112 Legitimacy
- 113 Legitimate expectations
- 114 Leibniz, G. W.
- 115 Leisure
- 116 Lexical priority: liberty, opportunity, wealth
- 117 Liberal conception of justice
- 118 Liberal people
- 119 Liberalism as comprehensive doctrine
- 120 Liberalism, comprehensive vs. political
- 121 Libertarianism
- 122 Liberty, equal worth of
- 123 Liberty of conscience
- 124 Locke, John
- 125 Love
- 126 Luck egalitarianism
- M
- N
- O
- P
- R
- S
- T
- U
- W
- Bibliography
- Index
116 - Lexical priority: liberty, opportunity, wealth
from L
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2015
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Abbreviations for Rawls’s texts
- Introduction
- A
- B
- C
- D
- E
- F
- G
- H
- I
- J
- K
- L
- 109 Law of Peoples
- 110 Law, system of
- 111 Least-advantaged position
- 112 Legitimacy
- 113 Legitimate expectations
- 114 Leibniz, G. W.
- 115 Leisure
- 116 Lexical priority: liberty, opportunity, wealth
- 117 Liberal conception of justice
- 118 Liberal people
- 119 Liberalism as comprehensive doctrine
- 120 Liberalism, comprehensive vs. political
- 121 Libertarianism
- 122 Liberty, equal worth of
- 123 Liberty of conscience
- 124 Locke, John
- 125 Love
- 126 Luck egalitarianism
- M
- N
- O
- P
- R
- S
- T
- U
- W
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
One of the purposes of Rawls’s theory of justice was to provide a systematic but nonutilitarian alternative to the intuitive balancing of competing values that characterizes ordinary moral thinking. Pre-theoretical reflection on justice typically involves a number of different “common sense precepts,” such as that people ought to be rewarded according to effort, contribution, or need (TJ 268). These “maxims of justice” frequently conlict, raising the problem of how they are to be weighted or prioritized. “Intuitionism” is Rawls’s term for the view that there is no “explicit” or “constructive” method for establishing general priority rules or assigning weights (TJ 30), and that we must simply “strike a balance by intuition” in each specific situation. Rawls thought that we should try to avoid direct appeals to intuition in disputes about justice, for if we have no procedure for determining the weights we assign to competing considerations, “the means of rational discourse have come to an end” (TJ 37). One of the great attractions of utilitarianism, for Rawls, was that it tried to solve “the priority problem” without relying on intuition (TJ 36; Scheffler 2003a, 427). Rawls sought a theory of justice that was systematic, like utilitarianism, but that did not reduce all considerations to the one criterion of utility. His theory therefore had to establish definite priority relations among its different principles.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge Rawls Lexicon , pp. 435 - 439Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2014