ABSTRACT
This chapter starts by distinguishing between different kinds of justice, or between different senses or uses of the word 'just'. In distinguishing between different kinds of justice people shall have to make crucial use of a distinction between different levels of moral thinking which the author have explained at length in other places. After speaking briefly of generic justice, Aristotle goes on to distinguish two main kinds of justice in the narrower or more particular sense in which it means 'fairness'. He calls this retributive and distributive justice. The difficulty of using formal justice in order to establish principles of substantial justice can indeed be illustrated very well by asking whether, and in what sense, justice demands equality in distribution. In actual fact, revolutions usually produce states of society very different from, and in most cases worse than, what their authors expected—which does not always stop them being better than what went before, once things have settled down.
