  The most important opponent of utilitarianism in the twentieth century was John Rawls (1921–2005). In his Theory of Justice (1971) he gave, like Hare, an account of ethics heavily indebted to Kant. But he insisted that utilitarianism does not capture the Kantian insight that each person is an end in himself or herself, because it ‘does not take seriously the distinction between persons’ (Theory of Justice, 22). He constructed the thought experiment of the ‘Original Position’ in which individuals imagine themselves not knowing what role in society they are going to play or what endowments of talent or material wealth they possess, and agree together on what principles of justice they will accept. Rawls thought it important that substantive conceptions of the good life were left behind in moving to the Original Position, because he was attempting to provide an account of justice that people with competing visions of the good could agree to in a pluralist society. Like early Habermas he included religions under this prohibition. In Political Liberalism (1993) he conceded that the procedure of the Original Position is itself ideologically constrained, and he moved to the idea of an overlapping consensus: Kantians can accept the idea of justice as fairness (which the procedure describes) because it realizes autonomy, utilitarians because it promotes overall utility, Christians because it is part of divine law, etc. But even here Rawls wanted to insist that adherents of the competing visions of the good leave their particular conceptions behind in public discourse and justify the policies they endorse on grounds that are publicly accessible. He described this as the citizen's duty of civility (Political Liberalism, iv).