ABSTRACT
The purpose of this chapter is to examine the role of the political liberties in Rawls’s theory of justice and to discuss how they ought to be distributed to promote justice and the common good. It acknowledges that one way to defend the equal distribution of the political liberties appeals to their contribution to self-respect. But Rawls holds that the fair value of the political liberties ought to be guaranteed, as well as their equal distribution. This chapter argues that it is a concern with preventing political domination that best explains the measures required to guarantee their fair value. The twin requirements of equal distribution and fair value contribute to the common good by operating at the institutional level. But these requirements can be supplemented by a principle – the principle of the common good – that guides the ways in which citizens interact with each other when they make use of their political liberties. The principle of the common good requires participants in political debates to reason from a perspective that considers the shared interests of citizens, understood as free and equal, and to adopt that perspective to decide which laws and policies to support.
