So he says in the opening of the preface, the first sentence which you read for today. But rather than seeing the core of that inviolability as lying in some notion of justice, he sees it as lying in a notion of rights.

Nozick is also concerned with a kind of inviolability. So Rawls is concerned with an inviolability of humanity based on a notion of justice. Each person, says Rawls, “possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override.” For this reason, says Rawls famously in these opening pages, “justice denies that the loss of freedom for some is made right by a greater good shared by others.” It plays the role with regard to the legitimacy of an institution that truth plays with regard to the legitimacy of a system of thought. So you’ll recall that when we were reading the Rawls–for some reason the remote is not working, that’s a pity but there we go–you’ll recall that when we were reading the Rawls, Rawls began his text by speaking of justice as the first virtue of social institutions. And the best way to get a sense of the project in which we will find ourselves engaged today is to contrast the opening pages of Rawls’s Theory of Justice with the opening pages of Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia.

Professor Tamar Gendler: So the topic of today’s lecture, as you can see from the title, is liberty. Philosophy and the Science of Human Nature PHIL 181 - Lecture 22 - Equality II

Anarchy state utopia