ABSTRACT
This chapter argues the debate between utilitarian and deontological conceptions of justice can be read largely in terms of the foundational priority afforded to justice in the latter. Hence, in the deontological scheme, it is justice which is seen as morally overriding by virtue of its foundational priority. Nevertheless, he offers two arguments one epistemological, one practical to support the i.e. of the priority of the subject. And it is in the realm of freedom that we see how the claims for the priority of the subject and the priority of the right hang together in the deontological ethic. To summarize the argument so far: On the Kantian view, the priority of justice is both moral and foundational. But unlike Kant, who posited the transcendental subject as the one fact of pure reason, and from which followed all morality, contemporary theorists wish to rescue the priority of the right from the obscurities of Kant's transcendental deduction.
