Comparative Research Into Justice As Fairness By Rawls And Justice In Holdings By Nozick

Social justice is the permanent concern of humankind. This paper has made a comparative research into justice as fairness by Rawls and justice in holdings by Nozick. This paper consists of four sections. The first section has reviewed the various conceptions of justice by Plato > Aristotle and Karl Marx etc, featuring the ethical values of social political and economic system and also the contractual tradition of Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau. The second section has firstly discussed the philosophical basis of Rawls' theory of justice, which is based upon rationality of individuals and the Kantian contractual tradition. And then we have looked into justice as fairness featuring the choice made by the individuals in the original positions behind the veil of ignorance. And then we notice that Rawls has criticized various forms of utilitarianism and refuted that the total welfare or benefits of society should be achieved at the sacrifice of individual freedoms. And finally the section conies to the two principles of justice: one is the principle of equality in the political dimension and the other is the difference principle in the economic dimension. The third section has firstly dealt with Nozick's justice in holdings, which is quite different from Rawls' as a kind of distributive justice. And then comes to the principle of historicism and end-result. Nozick has refuted all kinds of criterion in his distributive justice. The fourth section discusses how the social enterprise affects the distributive justice. Rawls claimed that it is the social co-operation that needs to be regulated when distributing the benefits arising from the social co-operation. However Nozick claimed that his entitlement theory can be justified whether it is social enterprise or not and that end-result principle should be rebutted, and then this section comes to their different views about how natural endowments influence distributive justice. Besides discrepancies there exist some common grounds in their theories. Namely, Both of mem appealed to the deontological theory of Kant as the underlying basis of their theories. And then the author has dealt with the tensions of their theories and finally the author has tried to apply their theories to the transformation in China.