ABSTRACT
A popular strain in legal theory would readily reduce the significance of Immanuel Kant to moral issues relating to law. In his theory of justice as fairness, John Rawls, for instance, refers to Kant’s ‘definitive’ membership in a school of contractual theorists and states that:
… the guiding idea [of the social contract] is that the principles of justice for the basic structure of society are the object of the original agreement. They are the principles that free and rational persons concerned to further their own interests would accept in an initial position of equality as defining the fundamental terms of their association. These principles are to regulate all further agreements; they specify the kinds of social cooperation that can be entered into and the forms of government that can be established.
