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new generation of philosophers. Much of the late twentieth century interest can
be traced back to John Rawls's seminal work (
1971
,
2001
). He was a pioneer in
the revival of the philosophical study of the theory of redistributive justice, apply-
ing the skills of analytical philosophy to the social contract tradition seen in the
Enlightenment works of Hobbes and Locke. At the core of Rawls's argument was
his justification for the use of fairness as a basic principle for redistributive justice,
not equality. This was derived from a hypothesized initial position, in which indi-
viduals were considered to be free and had equal opportunity, but were in a state of
ignorance, in the sense that they were unaware of either their status or their goods,
relative to others. He maintained that individuals would act rationally in this situ-
ation to choose an equal amount of primary goods to others, to ensure they would
not be disadvantaged by being inferior to others. This argument and its subsequent
detailed extensions provided a new theoretical basis for the concept of fairness as
a basis for distributional justice, one that had a rational, logical basis and did not
have to depend upon other justifications for legitimacy, such as commands from
some gods, or some assumed natural law. Among his extensive series of deductions
and recommendations, Rawls argued that political and legal institutions should be
established to prevent excessive concentration of wealth, to ensure that the least
advantaged members of society are not discriminated against. One of the key argu-
ments to justify this position is his view that the distribution of natural talents in
a population, and presumably the education that develops these talents, should be
regarded as a common asset, which should be used to benefit society as a whole. Of
course, the contributionists argue the opposite, that differential income extraction is
the prize for those with particular talents or skills. In addition, Rawls attacked the
utilitarian concept that lay behind many of the progressive policies of the past. The
weakness is that it assumes the needs of each person are the same, thereby ignor-
ing “
how the sum of satisfactions is distributed among individuals
” (Rawls
1971
,
p. 260). This focus on the sum of the utilities, not the satisfaction of the individuals
or groups affected, means that a utilitarian approach fails to address their problems,
which explains why those without power or interest, especially the most needy, are
increasingly left behind.
The work of Rawls stimulated an outpouring of articles and topics on the topic
of justice (Wellbank et al.
1982
; Lucash and Shklar
1986
; Sen
2009
). This led to:
attempts to show how the distribution of various goods could be justified (Walzer
1984
,
1986
); the standards or criteria by which redistributive justice can be judged;
the strains that exist between exponents of this approach and those derived from our
increasingly atomist society (Taylor
1986
); as well as to major critiques of his ideas
(Nozick
1974
). These and other studies have placed the issue of justice in a redis-
tributive sense back on the philosophical agenda, and created new principles for
justifying policies of redistributive justice, instead of the older dependence on moral
or other beliefs. Although Rawls has provided new theoretical perspectives on the
nature of justice, its basic rationale has been criticized as creating an initial a 'make-
believe' situation (Jackson
1986
). In other words, the initial hypothesised state that
justifies 'fairness' is far removed from the complex real world situations today, in
which people are aware of their goods and influence, and those with wealth and
