Social Contract and the Currency of Justice: An Introduction

Abstract

This is the fifth 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 two issues: (1) contractarian conceptions of justice, and (2) the question of what kinds of goods justice is concerned with (welfare, initial opportunity for welfare, resources, capabilities, etc.). The latter topic is a continuation from volume four (which could not contain all the relevant articles). Other volumes address the following issues: (1) the concept of justice, (2) whether justice is primarily a demand on individuals or on societies, and (3) the relative merits of conceptions of justice based on equality, on priority for those who have less, and on ensuring that everyone has a basic minimum, of the relevant goods (Volume 1); whether justice requires equality of some sort (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 this volume); and desert and entitlement conceptions of justice (Volume 6).