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.

This chapter develops a “big history” account of the place of justice in the great tale of humanity. The “human web” is spun across the earth as a result of our cooperative capacities. It is the point of justice to reflect on what it means for each individual to have a proper place in that web. We explore how it would be legitimate to enroll authors from vastly different periods in a unified story. The evolutionary account of justice in the “conversation of mankind” provides an answer. My account is “quasi”-historical. I recount the history of the notion in a way that develops it in an era of global interconnectedness. Over time, both scope and reach have expanded until we arrive at a contemporary notion that is global in scope and whose reach is rather extensive. The grounds-of-justice view is a way of accounting for the concept of justice today.