John Rawls’s Justice as Fairness: Political, not Metaphysical

Abstract

This article sheds light on some of the gaps in John Rawls's book A Theory of Justice . It is a summary of Rawls's later lectures which he collected in his book Political Liberalism . As Rawls mentions, the numerous critiques and responses to his theory of "justice as fairness" that he summarised in his 1971 book A Theory of Justice , a were a reverberation of an idea he wrote about in 1958 in an article entitled "Justice as Fairness", and they actually helped him to develop and clarify his theory of justice as a political conception that applies to the basic structure of a well-organised society in the context of a constitutional democracy.