In political liberalism the political virtues are understood as the attitudes, dispositions, and other qualities of character that would characterize good citizens of a just and stable liberal-democratic constitutional regime. Citizenship is a formal status, referring to various legal privileges, immunities, and responsibilities. The political virtues refer to good or exemplary citizenship, and so they correspond to “the ideal of a good citizen of a democratic state – a role specified by its political institutions” (PL 195). With their connection to this role and their inclusion in a political conception of justice, the political virtues presuppose the distinction between comprehensive doctrine and the domain of the political, i.e. the more narrowly defined set of liberal-democratic values, ideas, and ideals that make political liberalism possible.

References to the political virtues are sometimes accompanied by different examples, but the principal virtues include toleration, reasonableness, mutual respect, a sense of fairness, a spirit of compromise, and a readiness to meet others halfway (PL 122, 157, 163, 194; CP 439–444, 460). These are the characteristics associated with the willingness to cooperate with others on publicly acceptable terms (PL 163). The refusal to engage in resistance or revolution– what one might see as a form of civic moderation – is also said to be a political virtue, at least in those regimes that rise to the standard of being “moderately well-governed” (PL 347). Rawls even refers at times to the sense of justice as among the political virtues, though his more standard formulation is to describe the capacity for a sense of justice as a basic moral power(PL 402).