ABSTRACT
While I would not claim for equity what Rawls claimed for justice (that it is the ‘first virtue of social institutions’; see above, p. 18), it is a value whose social significance is unquestionable. That policies should be equitable, that the distributional consequences of policies should, so far as possible, be just or fair; these are considerations that policymakers ignore at their peril. A society that most of its members consider to be governed unjustly is an unstable one; indeed, a widespread feeling of social injustice is one of the most potent factors in revolutions.
