Abstract

This dissertation aims to demonstrate that the notion of justice loses its salience and thereby is doomed to be an endless controversial issue once it is confined within the horizon of principles and institutions alone. The theory of justice of John Rawls, "Justice as Fairness", which is the object of the present inquiry, faces such a charge because of its predominant structural or/and procedural overtone. ;The rub with Rawls's theory of justice is that it sacrifices too much of the richness of the concept of justice at the altar of the institutional or procedural concerns to the extent that his theory of justice not only fails to address the burning issues of social justice facing modern societies, but also, and from the philosophical perspective, ends up as a theory of justice in the abstract, but barely, a theory about justice in the concrete. ;This paradox has led us to a surprising and poignant discovery, namely, that the main "problemata" of Rawls's political philosophy is not real "social justice" at all, as he claims in his " magna charta", A Theory of Justice. ;There is more at stake. The charge against Rawls's conception of justice embraces the very ambitious agenda of the Harvard Philosopher that is concealed in his philosophical work, namely, the setting up of an exclusively political conception of justice. ;Our dissertation intends to restore the richness of the notion of social justice by bridging the gap so carefully maintained by Rawls between the political and the ethical or/and the metaphysical. ;Our main assumption is that if Rawls's "magnum opus" is properly read, that is, "backwards", one cannot fail to realize that even Rawls himself is unconsciously convinced that justice is not primarily a matter of "overlapping consensus", a political "stuff", but rather, a fundamental attribute of our human nature, that we should not take for granted, of course, but that we cannot, on the other hand, create ex nihilo