The First Principle: The Liberty Principle
The first and most important principle states that every individual has an equal right to basic liberties, Rawls claiming "that certain rights and freedoms are more important or 'basic' than others". For example, Rawls believes that "personal property" – personal belongings, a home – constitutes a basic liberty, but an absolute right to unlimited private property is not. As basic liberties, they are inalienable: no government can amend, infringe or remove them from individuals.
In A Theory of Justice, Rawls articulates the Liberty Principle as the most extensive basic liberty compatible with similar liberty for others; he later amended this in Political Liberalism, stating instead that "each person has an equal claim to a fully adequate scheme of equal basic rights and liberties" (emphasis added).
Read more about this topic: Justice As Fairness
Famous quotes containing the words the first, liberty and/or principle:
“Behind every individual closes organization; before him opens liberty,—the Better, the Best. The first and worse races are dead. The second and imperfect races are dying out, or remain for the maturing of the higher. In the latest race, in man, every generosity, every new perception, the love and praise he extorts from his fellows, are certificates of advance out of fate into freedom.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Musicians are seldom unemotional; a woman who could sing like that must know how to love indeed.
Girls brought up [as you were,] in a very strait-laced and puritan fashion, always pant for liberty and happiness, and the happiness they have never comes up to what they imagined. Those are the girls that make bad wives.”
—Honoré De Balzac (1799–1850)
“The world is not dialectical—it is sworn to extremes, not to equilibrium, sworn to radical antagonism, not to reconciliation or synthesis. This is also the principle of evil.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)