Introduction

Abstract

‘Just’ has a lot of senses; and a formula like ‘unjust actions are always wrong’ can express as many different moral beliefs as there are different senses of ‘just’. But even if we fix on one particular sense of ‘just’, there is a multiplicity of ways in which the value of an action can be held to depend on whether or not it is just in that sense, or on the degree of justice or injustice, in that sense, which can be attributed to it. ‘Unjust actions are always wrong’ expresses only one of these ways. For someone might hold, not that all actions are wrong or impermissible which are in some particular sense unjust, but that, for instance, only those actions are impermissible which are unjust to a certain degree, or that actions are impermissible if and only if they are both unjust and impermissible by utilitarian standards. And this is to say nothing about the different ways in which the obligatoriness of an action could be held to depend on whether or not or how just it is. Any belief which makes the value of actions depend in any way on whether or not they can be called just, or on how just or unjust they are, in any particular sense of ‘just’, I call a principle of justice: there are many more different conceivable principles of justice than there are even different senses of ‘just’. My first aim in this essay is to describe the range of senses of ‘just’, and the even wider range of conceivable principles of justice.