Rawls and the Justification of Majority Rule

A Theory of Justice makes room for majority rule: since the latter is at the same time a source of legitimacy in a democracy and a source of errors, Rawls uses it to explain that citizens in a well-ordered society have a duty to obey unjust laws. It is not enough, indeed, that a law opposes our sense of justice to make it loose its force of obligation: one has also a 'duty of civility' that imposes on us to accept, to a certain extent, the drawbacks of our institutions. That idea raises special problems that we shall be dealing with in order to better understand the relations between a theory of justice and majority rule. Adapted from the source document.