Love Quote by John Rawls

Rawls doesn’t bother with melodrama here; he diagnoses evil as a political preference. “Arbitrary power” is the tell: not power constrained by law, reasons, or reciprocity, but power that can’t be appealed, argued, or voted away. The bad man isn’t merely selfish. He wants a world where the rules are optional for him and binding for everyone else. That’s why “arbitrary” matters more than “power.” It’s the anti-principle, authority with no public face.

Then Rawls sharpens the blade: evil is animated by “the love of injustice.” That phrasing refuses the comfortable story that wrongdoing is accidental, a slip, a tragic lapse under pressure. Rawls implies a kind of positive appetite: some actors don’t just tolerate unfairness as a side effect; they enjoy the asymmetry itself. Injustice becomes an aesthetic, a thrill, a proof of dominance. It’s cruelty with a philosophy.

The context is Rawls’s lifelong project of separating legitimate coercion from mere force. In A Theory of Justice and later work, he insists that a just society is one people could endorse from an equal standpoint, behind a “veil of ignorance.” This quote is the negative image of that ideal: the person who cannot accept reciprocity because reciprocity would deny him the pleasure of unaccountable advantage.

Subtextually, Rawls is warning that the real threat to liberal democracy isn’t disagreement about policies; it’s the presence of people who reject justification itself. Where one side asks for reasons, the other demands submission. That’s not a debate. That’s an ambition.