Justice As Fairness Rhetorical Analysis

Philosophy Assignment

Topic: Select a passage of your choice and explain it in 1000 words.

Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical is an essay by John Rawls publish in 1985. It consists of two main principles of liberty and equality with the second being subdivided into Fair Equality of Opportunity and the Difference Principle.

The passage selected by me was on Page 232 of Justice as Fairness by John Rawls. In this reading he tells us as to how justice should be fairly distributed in the society. It should be equally distributed in the society with no discrimination of caste, creed etc. In this he uses elements of both Kantian and Utilitarian philosophy and has described a method of evaluation of social and political institutions.

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Hence we can see that Rawls is identifying his vision of justice which is neither egalitarian nor laissez faire.

The passage chosen by me says that in a country citizens should have the power to understand what is good and what is bad. Rawls also says that the citizens are free in what they conceive of themselves and also of one another as having the moral power to have a conception of the good. However, citizens may change their conception of the good on moral grounds with valid reasons and their own desires.

Rawls explains the above concept with an example. He says that when citizens convert from one religion to another they do not follow the previous religion. From that moment onwards they follow the new religion. Yet they do not stop being the persons they were before. We should not discriminate between those people just because they changed their religious affiliation. They should still possess the rights and duties they possessed before changing. After changing their religion, they do not lose their identity. Rawls describes this by saying that there is no loss of public identity. The thing that he implies is that everyone in the society is equal irrespective of what religion they follow. They deserve an equal say in everything and their opinions should be taken into consideration. They will still have the same rights and duties which they had before changing their religion. They would still have the same property and make claims like before but the only difference is that earlier they were connected by religious