Rawls distinguishes between liberty and the worth of liberty. We need to separate out, he suggests, what it is for liberty to be protected in a society and what the value is to a citizen in that society of having liberty protected. This distinction plays a central role in Rawls’s thinking about the values of freedom and equality.

It is commonly thought, and many theorists have argued, that the important values of liberty and equality can conflict and that we must often choose which one to promote. (See, for instance, Isaiah Berlin’s discussion of liberty and equality in Four Essays on Liberty (1969).) A central thesis of A Theory of Justice is that liberty and equality can be reconciled and Rawls’s distinction between liberty and its “worth” is crucial to establishing this thesis (TJ 179). Securing liberty and promoting equality are not competing goals that have to be traded against one another, Rawls claims. Rather, laws that secure liberty and laws that promote equality work together to secure some other important goals.

Rawls defines liberty as “the complete system of the liberties of equal citizens” (TJ 179). Liberty, on this view, consists of the various specific freedoms guaranteed equally to all by the first principle of justice, including freedom of speech, conscience, religion, and so on. Each of these freedoms ensures that people are able to do certain things without interference from the government or from private actors. For instance, freedom of speech ensures that people are able to engage in acts of, say, artistic expression without the government censoring them or private agents coercing them to stop.