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5 - The Significance of Injustice

from Part I - Rawls and History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 July 2023

Paul Weithman
Affiliation:
University of Notre Dame, Indiana
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Summary

The concept of justice that A Theory of Justice theorizes is, as Rawls puts it early on, “the proper distribution of the benefits and burdens of social cooperation.” Shortly thereafter, he comments, “Now this approach may not seem to tally with tradition.” The topic of this essay is the difference between Rawls’s concept of justice and the traditional one. My main observation is that the significance of injustice in Rawls’s sense is very different from the significance of injustice in the traditional sense. Traditional injustice entails that someone has been wronged in a way that warrants resentment, guilt, and indignation. Injustice in Rawls’s sense does not entail this.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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