10 - The Circumstances of Justice

Summary

Political philosophy is shaped by an understanding of the circumstances of justice, which describe the need for justice. This chapter argues that the circumstances of justice should be understood to include contingent facts about the history of the society to be governed, ideally, by principles of justice. In locating structures of domination within the circumstances of justice that motivate the theoretical task, I depart from the approach taken by John Rawls. Though I will not dispute the content of Rawls’s favored principles of justice, I show that when we revise the description of the circumstances of justice, we revise our understanding of the importance of those principles. We can thus add something to what Rawls has to say about the good of justice. One aspect of the good of distributive justice is that it provides a basis for moral repair in the wake of collective wrongdoing.