ABSTRACT
There is a way of reading Rawls that might support the view that his principles of justice are valid for any rational, self-interested beings and justified independently of the natural social and political world. Against such a reading, this chapter argues that the heart of Rawls’s argument lay in the proposed accord between principles worked up on the basis of fundamental ideas that are implicit in the public political culture and the considered opinions of a people about what is fair or just. These fundamental ideas and considered opinions, which form the evidential basis of the theory of justice as fairness, are neither merely subjective nor purely objective but rather embedded in the history, institutions, material culture and practices of the society in question. These are commonplace elements of our everyday social world, comparable to other institutional or interpretative entities that liberal naturalism considers to belong to nature.
