Contractarian social justice

My concern in presenting this survey of some recent debates in liberal political theory is to offer speculations about why contractarian theories of distributive justice have persisted for normative theorising about social or distributive justice. My claim will be that there is an affinity between the process of justification of norms of distributive justice and the character of some problems facing modern democratic states. This does not imply that the conclusions of contemporary normative theories are of only local concern, ¹ but it does show that the motivational force of any possible justification requires the equal recognition of those to whom the reasons are addressed, and this equal recognition must rule out certain conceptions of political philosophy as viable alternative ways of addressing the problem of justice.