Like Kant, Rawls is a deontological liberal. His book takes the main thesis of the deontological ethic as its central claim. That this claim has received little direct discussion in the voluminous critical literature on A Theory of Justice may attest to its fixed place in the moral and political assumptions of the time. It concerns not the principles of justice but the status of justice itself. It is the assertion that both opens the book and concludes it, the core conviction Rawls seeks above all to defend. It is the claim that ‘justice is the first virtue of social institutions’, the single most important consideration in assessing the basic structure of society and the overall direction of social change.

It is this claim for the primacy of justice that I propose to examine.