This is Part 4 of a four (or five) part series based on a conference-length version of a longer paper I’m currently preparing for submission to academic journals. Part 1 and Part 2 forcus on the idea of ‘circumstances of justice’ in Rawls and Hume, and each generated some deep and wide ranging discussions of the of the nature of justice and the treatment of justice in the history of philosophy. Part 3 added some brief critical analysis to the exegetical points of the first two parts.
In this section, I finally stick my neck out and offer my own account of the circumstances of justice – an account which I argue explains what is right about Rawls’s view by shedding his unsuitable Humean foundation. I believe this account addresses many of the concerns and objections raised in the comments on earlier sections, but I look forward to hearing the fresh, new objections it generates.
My plan for Part 5, which is not yet included in the full paper, is to say something more about why all this matters for our understanding of justice, independent of the interpretive puzzles focused on in the first three sections.