Rawls assesses conceptions of justice in terms of how stable a society governed by them would be. I describe how Rawls presents this view of stability differently in A Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism. I then argue that G.A. Cohen’s objections to this view largely fail insofar as we grant Rawls the claim that the task of principles of justice is to provide fair terms of cooperation. But I then develop an objection to this claim by drawing on Cohen’s critique of Rawls’s treatment of the circumstances of justice. These circumstances are more capacious than Rawls allows. Nonetheless, contra Cohen, we can retain one of the key insights of Rawls’s project, which is that justice is fundamentally about realizing a certain kind of relationship rather than realizing a particular distribution of goods. I sketch a Kantian conception of the relevant relationship and consider the role stability plays in it.

This chapter develops a “big history” account of the place of justice in the great tale of humanity. The “human web” is spun across the earth as a result of our cooperative capacities. It is the point of justice to reflect on what it means for each individual to have a proper place in that web. We explore how it would be legitimate to enroll authors from vastly different periods in a unified story. The evolutionary account of justice in the “conversation of mankind” provides an answer. My account is “quasi”-historical. I recount the history of the notion in a way that develops it in an era of global interconnectedness. Over time, both scope and reach have expanded until we arrive at a contemporary notion that is global in scope and whose reach is rather extensive. The grounds-of-justice view is a way of accounting for the concept of justice today.