The notion of being an “enlightened” person does not reduce simply to that of being a person who has highly developed cognitive abilities or disposes… - Raymond Geuss

The Tories are bright enough to realize they cannot get away with a frontal attack on the principle of universal provision of health services "free at the point of delivery" because it is so obviously in the interest of everyone who is not a shareholder in a pharmaceutical company or an insurance firm, so the plans seems to be to change the internal administrative structure of the health services so as gradually and imperceptibly to siphon away potentially highly profitable medical services to private organizations on a variety of specious grounds, leaving a skeleton public structure that is responsible only for less immediately profitable forms of provision. This public structure can then be expected to collapse of its own weight, thereby seeming to validate self-fulfilling claims about the inherent superiority of the private sphere over the public.

The point of one of <nowiki>[</nowiki>Rawls’<nowiki>]</nowiki> main constructions—the introduction of the “veil of ignorance”—is precisely to exclude from consideration empirical information that might prejudice the overriding normative force of the outcome. It is, then, extremely striking, not to say astounding, to the lay reader that the complex theoretical apparatus of Theory of Justice, operating through over 500 pages of densely argued text, eventuates in a constitutional structure that is a virtual replica (with some extremely minor deviations) of the arrangements that exist in the United States.

One obvious way to specify what it is that is “due” to someone is to appeal to existing legal codes, but what they will prescribe will vary enormously from one time and place to another. A second account of justice might appeal to some notion of merit or desert. The third approach is Aristotle’s “general” conception, which simply identified “justice” with the sum of all the virtues and excellences. A fourth conception of justice is the idea that justice is in some way to be connected to equality of shares, resources, or outcomes. Finally there is the idea of fairness or impartiality of procedure. One might think that Rawls’s view derives some of its apparent plausibility because of a gradual slide between the various senses of “justice.” People start from a vague intuition that justice as a “general” concept (in the third sense above) is extremely important for the proper functioning of a society; they then find it easy to shift from this to a particular conception that connects “justice” with fairness of procedure and (a certain kind of limited) equality.