Justice, Concept of & Conception of

John Rawls makes a crucial distinction between the concept of justice and specific conceptions of justice. He defines the concept of justice as “a proper balance between competing claims from a conception of justice as a set of related principles for identifying the relevant considerations that determine this balance.”¹ In contrast, a conception of justice is not so broad. To illustrate the difference, Rawls states that the concept of justice is “the role of its principles in assigning rights and duties and in defining the appropriate division of social justice” while “[a] conception of justice is an interpretation of this role.”² Justice as Fairness is a conception of justice.

1. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice: Revised Edition (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 9.
2. Ibid.