ABSTRACT
The conception of justice as fairness put forward in John Rawls’ Theory of Justice (Rawls 1971) established the importance of a focus on justice and on how our views of justice need to change in the context of plural modern societies. In a way, Rawls’ Theory restored important moral questions to the status of serious philosophical research. Rawls concentrated on our need to think about the organization of society that could validly be described as a just society. He returned to the idea of the social contract to redesign it in an intersubjective mode. His view of the social contract differed from preceding views in that he sought to generate basic political principles of ‘pure procedural justice’. He highlighted the idea that rights do not belong to the state of nature but to a political order, and that there are moral elements in the contract procedure that are best represented by the idea of the ‘veil of ignorance’ to secure moral impartiality. Later, Rawls pursued the premise of political autonomy to define how we could find a translation of the concept of justice into the political realm. Political Liberalism (Rawls 1993) is the work in which Rawls established the idea of a political concept of justice in a plural society. His paradigm of justice, because it defined fairness in terms of certain procedures that generate an adequately just outcome, entailed not just an idea of moral equality but a rough equality of powers and resources.