Ariadne's Thread on Justice
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Rawls and Tradition

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Fred Speaking
I would like to put Rawls in some sort of historical context. In western philosophy, there are several long standing traditions that discuss justice, including the following:

 

  • a theological tradition that relates justice to divine law
  • a natural law tradition that attempts to construct justice using human reason
  • a utilitarian tradition that founds justice on the principle of utility
  • a social contract tradition that founds justice on a real or hypothetical social contract
 

Rawls saw himself in the social contract tradition. He thought of John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Immanuel Kant as the main writers in the tradition. He sometimes remarked that his theory was in some sense Kantian, but I think he laid less stress on this aspect as time went on.
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