Expectations as a metric of justice in John Rawls’s theory
Abstract
The article deals with the reasons for John Rawls to present his conception of justice, justice as fairness, as pure background procedural justice. This characterization makes justice as fairness a conception of justice whose metric is citizens’ expectations regarding certain primary goods (rather than those primary goods themselves). As a conception of procedural justice sensitive only to the expectations of citizens regarding the results of social cooperation, justice as fairness is, with regard to the market and contract law, in an intermediate position between (libertarian) conceptions of justice that make use of a metric of rights and results-based conceptions of justice. The central thesis of the article is that the indifference to the results of cooperation and the consequent procedural character of justice as fairness are to be attributed to the very conditions under which, in Rawls’s theory, the principles of justice are chosen – more precisely, to the fact that this is a choice of principles applicable to the social institutions under which citizens cooperate.
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