ABSTRACT
The term ‘social justice’ is today generally used as a synonym of what used to be called ‘distributive justice’. The reason why most people continue firmly to believe in ‘social justice’, even after they discover that they do not really know what the phrase means, is that they think if almost everyone else believes in it, there must be something in the phrase. In a society in which individual aims were necessarily different, based on specialised knowledge, and efforts came to be directed towards future exchange of products with yet unknown partners, common rules of conduct increasingly took the place of particular common ends as the foundations of social order and peace.
