(Return to main path)

All right. I want to go back to the list I gave you a few minutes ago. I was asking then which of the following considerations would be relevant to questions about justice.

What I think you are saying now is that we need a broader theory of justice to specify which of these variables are relevant to which questions. One theory might tell us that people with equal needs should be treated equally. Another theory might downplay need and tell us that people with equal merit or performance should be treated equally.

I must admit that if we look at this historically, there probably have been a number of theories that have done just that -- they have focused on one of these considerations and made it the single most important relevant consideration when deciding which cases are equal.