Religious Faith and John Rawls

Extract

The thesis borrows Leon’s idiosyncratic use of a distinction between “egoism,” which is a matter of desiring things, and “egotism,” which involves desiring superiority to other people. Though Rawls defines sin as the repudiation of others—a refusal of the central ethical task of encountering others in Christian love—he treats egotism as the main source of sin. It is not our desire for material things but our wish for superiority to other “people that is the main threat to proper relationships with one another and so with God