Introduction

Justice is a lot like love: we understand it intuitively, even though we may struggle to define it precisely, and both draw strong, passionate reactions from the people who care about them. And just as with love, no one openly says they hate justice -- everyone wants justice for themselves, and, to some extent, for others too.

But justice is not the same kind of thing as love. Love is about our personal relationships with a few people we know well. Justice, on the other hand, concerns our life in society as a whole -- how public life is ordered, and the principles according to which social goods and social duties are distributed among the different members of society. Because of this, questions of justice sit at the very centre of politics.

This chapter builds towards being able to do three things: identify some of the different principles of justice that have been put forward by different societies at different periods of time; explain what is meant by distributive justice; and discuss the political philosopher John Rawls' argument that a fair and just society would actually be in the interest of every one of its members, and can therefore be defended on rational grounds.