JUSTICE AND FAIRNESS

Justice is a concept at the core of many fundamental debates in political and ethical theory. In this essay I consider what is at stake in one important debate, the effort to divorce conceptions of justice from conceptions of the good. Focusing primarily on the work of John Rawls, I analyze the underlying logic of arguments based on the notion that principles of justice can be the product of “reasonable agreement” among people who hold conflicting conceptions of the good. In doing so I consider four primary criticisms of the argument: The project is a false one in that, while it purports to be neutral, it in fact gives primacy to a particular, liberal, individualistic conception of the good on which the project is grounded; the project is inadequate because its construction of the deliberation and decision-making process fails to take account of important social factors; the project is misguided in that it fails to take account of actual social practices and, thus, fails to capture the complexity of the demands on a theory of justice; and the project is destined to fail because a theory of justice adequate to the challenges of modern society cannot be constructed in an abstract, thought-experiment way.