Abstract

John Rawls’s professed aim in Justice as Fairness: A Restatement is to clarify in a concise way the changes his political philosophy has undergone since A Theory of Justice. In about 200 pages Rawls summarizes his current view that justice as fairness is a reasonable political conception, or, in other words, that liberal-egalitarianism is justified for modern democratic cultures since it follows from a certain notion of fairness implicit in them. The key question that most readers probably want answered is whether JF will be useful to them if they are already familiar with Political Liberalism. With an aim to answering this question, I focus here on reviewing material that one finds in JF but not in PL.