Basic Structure and the Value of Equality

Evaluation from the point of view of justice is at once encompassing and austere. Judgments of justice and injustice take in whole societies. But to conclude that a society is just or unjust, I don’t have to know what everyone in the society is doing. It’s enough that I know how the society’s institutions are arranged, or that I understand the basic framework that shapes its members’ interaction over time or the basic mechanisms that distribute them over a range of prospects for living better and worse lives. It is possible to account for the structural bent and the institutional focus of our reasoning about justice without attributing much moral depth to these inclinations. Suppose that justice requires that people hold goods in some pattern. Before we can achieve that pattern we need to get a grip on the whole web of relations among people’s actions and holdings. But that web is very big, and we are forced to narrow in on a mere handful of the most important relations. Moreover it is only by submitting our largely decentralized and myopic exchanges to a battery of centrally promulgated rules that we can hope to find traction on the pattern of holdings. We risk upending the pattern we prefer if we separately aim for it from our different corners of the society. The institutional cast of our distributive judgments and our accent on the justice of basic frameworks are well-advised, then, but their warrant is derivative. They have no moral basis deeper than an awareness of garden-variety limits to social coordination. John Rawls is widely understood to have claimed a more foundational significance for the selective attention of reasoning about justice when