OK.
We mentioned in our first session that the word 'justice' can be
applied to many different sorts of things: Here's the list we used:
- Just societies
- Just laws
- Just institutions
- Just acts
- Just decisions
- Just distributions of things
- Just punishment
- Just men and women
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Rawls isn't concerned with all these possibilities. He is concerned with what he
calls the "basic structure of society." (Theory,
section #2)
He tries to be a little more specific when he says that he is
concerned with
"the way in which the major social institutions distribute
fundamental rights and duties and determine the division of advantages from
social cooperation."
(Theory, section #2)
In one way his concern is very traditional. He
sees justice as having to do with how benefits and burdens are
distributed. This fits in with the ancient notion of justice as
"giving each his or her due." (Notice that I updated that to
explicitly include women.) We said before that this phrase
is empty unless we have some substantive principles to give it
content. Rawls wants to supply those substantive principles.
Thomas Pogge, a former student of Rawls, has
written extensively about Rawls. He says that Rawls wants to produce
a "public criterion of justice" that can be used to evaluate
alternative basic structures for
society.
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