ill call the "political circumstances" that support self-respect. There are three of these. The first is the duty of mutual respect, which Rawls thinks would be adopted by the parties in the original position along with his two principles of distributive justice. The two principles of distributive justice include, first, the equal liberty principle, which prescribes the equal distribution of the maximal degree of liberty compatible with its being distributed equally. The second allows inequalities of wealth provided that there is substantive equality of opportunity and that the inequalities maximally benefit the person with the least wealth. The second of these constraints on inequality is termed the "difference principle." The second political circumstance that supports citizens' self-respect, according to Rawls, is the difference principle and the third is the "lexical ordering" of his two principles, also known as the doctrine of the priority of liberty. This doctrine prohibits constraining liberty for the sake of increased wealth. In what follows, I examine Rawls's explanation of both the personal and political circumstances that sustain self-respect. I show that citizens' self-respect is supported by all of these circumstances when self-respect is understood as the mattering notion. However, citizens' self-respect is supported only by the personal circumstances, and perhaps by one of political circumstances, when self-respect is understood as the goodfor-oneself notion. It follows that if Rawls were offering the good-foroneself view in his account of self-respect as a primary social good, then he would indeed by offering an equivocal account of self-respect, as critics have maintained. Moreover, Rawls, to a certain degree, invites this objection because the passages explaining the political circumstances that secure selfrespect are often cryptic. Rawls is attempting in these passages to show that certain aspects of his view are justified by the fact that they OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 2/11/2012, SPi 246