A General Conception of Justice

Abstract I argue for a general conception of justice that aims to identify what is common to multiple complementary types of justice. John Rawls agrees that there are multiple types (or “levels” or “subjects”) of justice, each needing its own principles, but he opposes a general conception in favour of “unity by appropriate sequence.” I present my general conception — justice as environment-shaping responsibility — as a different path to theoretical unity in a multi-type view of justice. I show how my general conception of justice can be arrived at through a process of generalizing that starts with Rawls’s conception of domestic justice.