ABSTRACT

Before John Rawls wrote, utilitarianism was the dominant view within Anglo-American moral and political philosophy. Since A Theory of Justice, rights-oriented liberalism has come to predominate. Rawls's work is an argument within rights-oriented liberalism. Much of the debate about the priority of the right has focused on competing conceptions of the person. In A Theory of Justice, Rawls linked the priority of the right to a voluntarist, or broadly Kantian, conception of the person. In Political Liberalism, Rawls defends the priority of the right over the good. He sets aside, for the most part, issues raised in the first two waves of debate, about utility versus rights and libertarian versus egalitarian notions of distributive justice. The difficulty of asserting the priority of "political values" without reference to the claims of morality and religion can be seen by considering two political controversies that bear on grave moral and religious questions.