ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on linking the understanding of justice to the nature of the society and the kind of opportunities and freedoms that people actually have, not just to institutions and practices. The starting-point of Rawls’s formulation of the theory of justice is his insistence that the idea of justice — and the institutions needed for it — should be based on the demands of a more foundational concept than justice, namely, fairness. Rawls’s principles of justice are used to set up, as it were, the basic institutional structure of the society. The Rawlsian theory of justice has been a major constructive force in political philosophy, welfare economics and legal theory.
