Abstract

ABSTRACT Justice has become the dominant currency in which we frame our aspirations for a better world. Yet is it adequate to the task? Why not be generous to others, rather than merely just? Why be so concerned with keeping score, when part of the point of keeping score is to ensure that one does not contribute more than one's due? One response, pressed particularly by feminists, is that we should be suspicious of alternatives to justice, precisely because they are by their nature less than fully just. Yet this response risks begging the question. Another possibility is that justice is the currency of a distinctive, recognizably modern social order, and the institutions and practices that embody that order. Justice makes certain goods more possible, goods that we are steeped in, out of which we have built much of our lives, in which we have couched our sense of progress. By the same token, it makes other, more organic, more communal, more opaque goods, less accessible. That is the price we pay for justice. We have reason to pay it in many cases, to accept it in others. Yet we also have reason to regret justice, even as we embrace it.