Justice

Why does justice claim primacy in modern liberal thought, and what kind of self must it presuppose? In his landmark study Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, Michael Sandel examines the philosophical architecture of John Rawls’s liberal theory — a project that seeks to ground justice as the first virtue of social institutions, derived independently of any particular vision of the good life. Sandel argues that this ambition depends on an image of the person as free, rational, and prior to its ends — an image that appears both powerful and problematic when applied to real moral and civic life.

The primacy of justice and its two meanings

Sandel distinguishes two senses of the claim that justice is primary. The first, moral priority, asserts that justice outranks all other social goods: rights cannot be sacrificed for welfare or happiness. This is the sense defended by Kant and echoed by Rawls’s insistence that "justice is the first virtue of social institutions." The second, foundational priority, claims that principles of justice must be justified without reference to any substantive conception of the good. Here, Sandel says, lies liberalism’s distinctive aspiration to neutrality.

To make justice foundational, Rawls adapts Kant’s transcendental ethics into a procedural device — the famous original position — in which rational parties choose principles of justice behind a veil of ignorance. The device’s purpose is to isolate the moral standpoint from all particular interests, producing fairness through impartiality. Yet Sandel’s question is simple: can we really separate justice from the good without distorting the moral agents whose choices make justice possible?

Rawls’s reformulation of Kant

Rawls’s effort is essentially a fusion of Kant and Hume. He retains Kant’s moral rigor — the supremacy of right over good — but casts it in Humean, empiricist terms: moral principles arise from a hypothetical procedure, not from metaphysical postulates. The original position "+ veil of ignorance" replaces Kant’s transcendental subject; it is meant to secure universal validity through impartial reasoning among equals. However, Sandel argues that this reformulation inherits Kant’s detachment while losing his moral metaphysics.

The result is an ethics of possession: the self is the owner of its ends, not constituted by them. You are imagined as a chooser who can adopt or drop attachments, religious beliefs, or projects without altering your basic identity. This unencumbered self enables Rawls’s ideal of fairness but drains moral life of its constitutive depth. Your commitments become external possessions rather than expressions of who you are.

The problem of moral psychology

Once justice is made prior to the good, the moral psychology of agency shifts. Rawls’s person deliberates instrumentally: ranking preferences, selecting means, and adhering to procedural norms. But Sandel insists that moral reflection often involves learning who you are, not merely choosing among desires. This reflective, cognitive dimension — the power to interrogate the worth of ends — disappears from Rawls’s model. In real life, commitments like citizenship, vocation, or faith may shape not only what you pursue but the kind of person you become.

Justice as remedial virtue

Sandel also reconsiders the context in which justice arises. Drawing on Hume’s “circumstances of justice,” he notes that fairness only becomes necessary where scarcity and conflicting ends exist. In families or communities marked by abundance and goodwill, justice recedes as generosity and trust prevail; when formal fairness replaces fraternity, moral life can actually deteriorate. Thus, justice may be indispensable but not ultimate — a remedial rather than perfect virtue.

Community and the limits of neutrality

Ultimately, Sandel claims Rawls’s entire system depends on a tacit communal background it cannot admit. To treat talents as common assets, the difference principle presupposes a shared moral community capable of validating mutual claims. Yet Rawls’s “sentimental” account of community — a network of fellow-feeling among still-independent individuals — lacks the constitutive substance to sustain this moral vision. The liberal self, imagined as self-creating, cannot account for the solidarities that make justice meaningful.

From metaphysics to political liberalism

In his later work, Political Liberalism, Rawls tries to escape these difficulties by renouncing metaphysical claims altogether. He reframes his theory as a "political, not metaphysical" conception that citizens can endorse for diverse reasons — through an overlapping consensus and the use of public reason. Sandel acknowledges this shift as ingenious but partial: by bracketing substantive moral debate, public reason may secure stability but at the cost of civic depth, moral integrity, and meaningful deliberation.

Across these arguments, Sandel’s central message emerges: liberalism’s insistence that justice must stand prior to the good creates a vision of persons too thin for the moral work justice demands. To sustain rights, solidarity, and moral growth, you must recover an idea of the self as formed — and sometimes defined — by the communities and moral traditions to which it belongs. Justice, he concludes, cannot be the only virtue of social life; it must coexist with and sometimes yield to the goods of shared identity, meaning, and civic friendship.

At the heart of Sandel’s reconstruction lies the idea that justice operates on two levels — as a moral standard and as a foundational principle. If you conflate these, you risk misunderstanding both Kant and Rawls. Moral priority tells you that justice should override expedience: you should never sacrifice basic rights for utility. Foundational priority adds that principles of justice must be justified without appealing to any goods or ends. Rawls weaves these together to claim a moral order derived solely from fairness.

Moral versus justificatory priority

Sandel shows that the first is ethically intuitive; the second is philosophically radical. Few dispute that fairness matters most in distributing rights, but asserting that fairness must be justified independently of all conceptions of the good means divorcing politics from moral substance. Mill grounded justice in utility, and Aristotle tied it to human flourishing. Rawls breaks with both, claiming you can locate justice through an abstract contract that presumes nothing substantive about the good life.

The costs of detachment

You can see the problem when you test the theory on speech or religion. A neutral policy may allow offensive demonstrations in Skokie and forbid racists in Selma, yet this symmetry ignores the moral content of each case. Likewise, the right to choose any faith presupposes a view of belief as a voluntary act, which many religious traditions deny. Liberal neutrality protects choice at the cost of moral evaluation. Sandel’s critique is not that Rawls is wrong to prioritize justice, but that the abstraction drains justice of meaning when detached from context and character.

The practical test

If you grasp both senses of primacy, you begin to see the stakes: moral priority tells you when justice should prevail; foundational priority tells you how you can know what justice means. Together they embody liberalism’s ideal of neutrality — and its limits. For Sandel, those limits appear whenever the pursuit of fairness blinds society to the thicker moral languages of belonging, purpose, and shared ends that give political life its substance.

Sandel argues that Rawls’s project ultimately rests on a particular anthropology — an image of the self as free, rational, and unencumbered. In this picture, you are a subject who has ends rather than one who is partly defined by them. This notion, traceable to Kant’s transcendental subject, aims to safeguard autonomy by depicting persons as prior to their social roles, desires, and attachments. The difficulty is that this view, while morally protective, obscures the communal and historical dimensions of identity.

From Kant to Rawls: the procedural turn

Kant’s transcendental subject stands outside the world of causes, able to legislate moral law through reason alone. Rawls tries to secularize this move through his original position. The parties behind the veil of ignorance are stripped of empirical features — gender, class, talents, convictions — in order to decide fair principles. The resulting person is effectively a procedural version of Kant’s noumenal self. Sandel calls this “deontology with a Humean face”: metaphysical rigor without metaphysical commitment.

Agency as possession

For Rawls, freedom is defined by distance from your desires: autonomy lies in being able to step back and choose among them. Sandel accepts part of this but emphasizes its moral shallowness. A person who merely chooses between plans needs no sense of self beyond preference-satisfaction. Yet agency also involves recognizing which desires deserve endorsement — a cognitive process of discovering your character and guiding commitments. Without that level, freedom devolves into arbitrariness or mere self-management.

The contingent self and its losses

Because Rawls’s person stands prior to all attachments, values become possessions that can be swapped or discarded. That image works for protecting rights against coercion but not for explaining moral loyalty or civic virtue. A society of possessive selves risks hollowing out the sources of solidarity that justice relies on. Sandel’s response is not nostalgic but philosophical: any plausible moral theory must recognize that who you are, and what counts as just for you, cannot be purified of history and community.

Rawls’s original position is the centerpiece of his justification for justice as fairness — but Sandel treats it as both brilliant and revealing. Designed as a thought experiment, it asks you to imagine rational agents choosing social principles while ignorant of their own status. From this emptiness, Rawls hopes to derive impartial principles of liberty and equality. Sandel sees in this model both the power of moral imagination and the weakness of the procedural view of the self.

Ignorance as fairness

Behind the veil, the parties know only general facts about human nature and scarcity. They seek primary goods—rights, opportunities, wealth—that anyone would want regardless of specific values. The thought experiment elegantly equalizes bargaining positions. Yet, as Sandel points out, it does so by abstracting from precisely what makes moral life rich: particular attachments, loves, and convictions that inform any real discussion of justice.

Choice or recognition?

Rawls vacillates between describing the original position as a process of “choice” and of “acknowledgment.” If the parties simply choose, the theory is voluntarist: justice becomes whatever procedure yields consensus. If they acknowledge certain principles as evident, the device functions as an epistemic window into moral truth. Sandel argues that this ambiguity reveals the tension between Rawls’s empiricism and his Kantian heritage. In either case, neutrality proves elusive — the very shape of the procedure presupposes a view of reason, motivation, and value.

Contract versus justification

Sandel distinguishes two kinds of justification: contractual (binding through consent) and moral (binding through principle). Actual consent, he observes, cannot validate injustice — a promise made under coercion is void. Rawls accordingly seeks a hypothetical standpoint, yet this too requires antecedent moral standards to judge fairness. You cannot escape the need for substantive moral criteria. Even the hypothetical agreement presupposes moral reasons for why those particular assumptions are fair.

What emerges is a profound question: does the contract itself justify justice, or do moral intuitions justify the contract? Sandel suggests the latter. The original position helps you clarify, not create, moral knowledge — an insight that undercuts Rawls’s ambition to make procedural fairness self-sufficient.

When Rawls shifts to distribution, he applies his procedural reasoning to economic life. His difference principle allows inequalities only if they benefit the least advantaged. This rests on a striking moral claim: talent and birth are morally arbitrary, so the rewards that flow from them should serve everyone. Sandel explores the profound ethical stakes of this proposal, especially its implications for desert, ownership, and communal responsibility.

The arbitrariness argument

If you do not deserve your natural abilities, it seems unfair to claim the fruits of them as personal property. Rawls’s answer is to regard talents as a “common asset,” integrating privilege into a cooperative scheme. Sandel notes how radical this is: it implies that moral worth derives not from effort or virtue but from participation in a just structure. Joel Feinberg’s analysis of desert helps clarify the point: under Rawls, only legitimate institutional expectations, not personal merit, ground distributive claims.

Nozick and Dworkin’s responses

Robert Nozick rejects this “patterned” approach, arguing that just holdings depend on history, not pattern: if acquisitions were voluntary and transfers fair, inequalities are permissible. Ronald Dworkin, while closer to Rawls, also underscores that merit is socially defined by institutional purposes. Sandel uses these debates to show that once desert is displaced, justice implicitly requires a notion of shared moral identity to justify redistributing what individuals once claimed as theirs.

Community as foundation

Without a constitutive community — one that gives real content to “we” — calling talents common assets risks treating people as means to abstract ends. Sandel suggests a richer alternative: see talents as gifts for which you are a steward, not an owner. This language of guardianship presumes shared membership and moral fellowship. But because Rawls’s theory rests on voluntarist premises, it cannot generate that communal ethos from within. Justice, Sandel concludes, depends on precisely the kind of constitutive moral ties that liberal neutrality excludes.

In his later work, Rawls seeks to avoid metaphysical controversy by recasting his theory as “political liberalism.” Instead of asserting one correct view of moral truth, he invites citizens with diverse comprehensive doctrines — religious or secular — to concur on a shared political conception of justice. Sandel reads this as a pragmatic evolution and a revealing retreat: a philosophical framework becomes a political compromise.

Overlapping consensus

Rawls now defines citizens as free and equal in their “public” identity, even if their private lives follow deeper moral or faith commitments. This overlapping consensus aims to maintain stability: justice becomes freestanding, justified not by truth but by agreement among reasonable views. Public reason then demands that, in political debate, you use public values accessible to all — fairness, reciprocity, liberty — instead of sectarian or metaphysical claims.

The price of exclusion

Sandel applauds the inclusiveness but worries about the cost. By bracketing moral argument, public reason limits the range of legitimate discourse. Debates about abortion or slavery, historically grounded in comprehensive moral views, illustrate the problem: when neutrality silences claims to moral truth, it risks absurd outcomes — as when “popular sovereignty” was used to defend slavery’s legality. Genuine deliberation, Sandel insists, requires admitting substantive moral language into the public square.

Reasonable pluralism and civic virtue

Political liberalism depends on “reasonable pluralism” — the idea that citizens will disagree about the good but can still agree on justice. Yet modern societies also deeply dispute what justice itself demands. Thus, Rawls must declare some views “unreasonable,” which undermines neutrality. Sandel’s closing challenge is civic, not metaphysical: sustaining a moral democracy requires more than tolerance — it requires shared deliberation about what is right and good. The public sphere must be a place not of avoidance but of engagement with moral meaning.