Justice in General: An Introduction

Abstract

This is the first volume of Equality and Justice, a six-volume collection of the most important articles of the twentieth century on the topic of justice and equality. This volume addresses the following three (only loosely related) issues: (1) What is the concept of justice? (2) Is justice primarily a demand on individuals or on societies? (3) What are the relative merits of conceptions of justice based on equality, based on priority for those who have less, and based on ensuring that everyone has a basic minimum, of the relevant goods? Other volumes of this collection address the following issues: the general demands of equality (Volume 2); the question of who (animals, members of other societies, future people, etc.) is owed justice (Volume 3); the question of what kinds of goods (welfare, initial opportunity for welfare, resources, capabilities, etc.) are relevant for justice (Volume 4 and part of Volume 5); contractarian conceptions of justice (part of Volume 5); and desert and entitlement conceptions of justice (Volume 6).