ABSTRACT

This chapter shows how contemporary rights-based liberalism originates in certain strands of eighteenth-century thought. Only if the moral subject is conceptualized in a particular manner can justice be primary in the way that deontological liberalism demands. John Rawls notes that there are many different subjects of justice. For Rawls, however, the primary subject of justice is the basic structure of society, in particular, 'The way in which the major social institutions distribute fundamental rights and duties and determine the division of advantages from social cooperation'. The social institutions are the primary subject of justice because, they define men's rights and duties and influence their life-prospects, what they can expect to be and how well they can hope to do. For Rawls, the central deontological claim for the priority of the right provides the only appropriate way for thinking about social justice.