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Rawlsis Defense of the Priority of Liberty: A Kantian Reconstruction

The First Priority Rule (the Priority of Liberty) of John Rawls’s Justice as Fairness reads: “the principles of justice are to be ranked in lexical order and therefore the basic liberties can be restricted only for the sake of liberty.” The basic liberties are those commonly protected by constitutional regimes, including “freedom of speech and assembly; liberty of conscience and freedom of thought; freedom of the person . . . ; the right to hold personal property and freedom from arbitrary arrest and seizure. . . .” (p. 53). The Priority of Liberty treats these liberties as paramount and prohibits their sacrifice for the sake of efficiency, utilitarian and perfectionist ideals, or even other principles within Justice as Fairness (e.g., Fair Equality of Opportunity and the Difference Principle). The Priority of Liberty has always played a central role in Rawls’s political theory. Rawls himself notes that “the force of justice as fairness would appear to arise from two things: the requirement that all inequalities be justified to the least advantaged, and the priority of liberty. This pair of constraints distinguishes it from intuitionism and teleological theories” (p. 220). As we shall see, its importance in his work has if anything increased over time. Part of the reason for this greater prominence is Rawls’s growing ambivalence about the other distinctive elements of