Thinking about justice: a traditional philosophical framework

Abstract

This chapter describes a philosophical approach to theorizing justice as it has developed in Europe and beyond. We first briefly discuss what distinguishes a philosophical approach to justice from other possible approaches to justice, by emphasizing the normative focus of philosophical theorizing about justice, that is a focus on questions not about how things actually are, but about how things ought to be. Next, we discuss what sort of methods can be used to justify normative claims about justice. Following this, in a longer section, we outline some of the major questions about justice that have drawn the attention of philosophers and indicate how competing conceptions of justice have arisen from different answers to these questions. The goal here is not to answer but to elucidate various questions and challenges, and to establish a framework for understanding and distinguishing different kinds of normative claims about justice.