John Rawls' A Theory of Justice
Read pages 1-7 of these excerpts from John Rawls' 1971 text. Stop when you reach the subheading on page 7, "Two Principles of Justice." Rawls aims to provide a theory of justice that is even more general than that of Locke or Kant, since it is based on purely hypothetical original position. How would we choose to organize society, if we had no idea what position we would have in it? Rawls' idea is that we should try to make it as fair as possible so that no matter what position we ended up in, we would have the same resources and chances as everyone else.