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Title: A thorough analytic treatment of social ethics.
Review: Rawls exposition is clear; He defines Justice as the first virtue of society, and then defines Justice as Fairness, and proceeds from there to a description of a set of formally fair procedures for constructing a just society. Chief among those is his doctrine of "The Original Position", i.e. the situation in which a person takes no thought for personal advantage, including one's own in-born abilities, and then attempts to construct an ethical framework to guide the constitution of society. Although the work is vague, it is because he necessarily works at a very high level of abstraction. I also believe his work is -wrong- (because I think valuing human life is the first virtue of human society, not justice), but it is the clearest description of Kantian analytic social theory ever presented. As such, if it -is- wrong, it is because analytic social theories are wrong as a class, not because Rawls made mistakes. A very good book.
