First, individual rights cannot be sacrificed for the sake of the general good, and second, the principles of justice that specify these rights cannot be premised on any particular vision of the good life. What justifies the rights is not that they maximize the general welfare or otherwise promote the good, but rather that they comprise a fair framework within which individuals and groups can choose their own values and ends, consistent with a similar liberty for others.
The simplest way of understanding justice is giving people what they deserve. This idea goes back to Aristotle. The real difficulty begins with figuring out who deserves what and why.
Whether you're a libertarian liberal or a more egalitarian liberal, the idea is that justice means being non-judgmental with respect to the preferences people bring to public life.
To argue about justice is unavoidably to argue about virtues, about substantive moral and even spiritual questions.
I find this in all these places I've been travelling - from India to China, to Japan and Europe and to Brazil - there is a frustration with the terms of public discourse, with a kind of absence of discussion of questions of justice and ethics and of values.
There's no necessary connection between maximizing social utility or economic wealth and creating a flourishing democracy. The first does not guarantee the second. The only way to create a flourishing democracy is to find ways to reason together about the big questions, including hard questions about justice and the common good, to reason together about these questions so that we as citizens can decide how to shape the forces that govern our lives.
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