ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that Ronald Dworkin’s liberalism includes a set of second-order virtues: these virtues specify how people ought to make choices about their lives, not what choices they ought to make. John Rawls explicitly denies that liberalism includes an account of which virtues or lives are good. One important reason for pursuing an investigation of Rawls’s ideas in relation to intrinsic virtues is that, although Rawls asserts that he does not affirm any specific conception of such virtues, many writers claim that he does. There is one virtue referred to by Rawls: the virtue of fraternity. Rawls claims that fraternity is expressed by the principles of social justice that are at the heart of liberalism. The fundamental idea of liberalism is, in Rawls’s view, that society ought to be arranged according to principles everyone can accept as reasonable.
