The Persistence of Justice as Fairness. Reflections on Rawls’s Legacy

2021 marked the 100th anniversary of John Rawls’s birth, while his first landmark work, A Theory of Justice, turned half-a-century old. As years go by, his ideas retain utmost centrality in contemporary political philosophy. Of course, many rejected Rawls’s answers; and yet very few could neglect, let alone convincingly invalidate, his questions on the principles of justice, the methods to achieve and justify them, their relationship to human nature and moral psychology, their designated subject (individual conduct or basic structure?), the peculiarity of political normativity, the possibility of and approaches to political objectivity, the scope of acceptable disagreement and the justifiability of its borders, the transposition of justice to the global level – questions which still linger on, and keep penetrating an increasingly vast array of issues and subfields. Rawls’s framework, in turn, has been constantly expanded and stretched beyond its original horizons since the times of A Theory of Justice. This volume attempts to address such legacy, and to keep track of the spread of the Rawlsian questions and answers throughout contemporary philosophy and beyond.