The circumstances of justice are the background conditions in which the question of justice arises. This is the question about how to distribute the beneits and burdens of social cooperation as well as about the rights and duties that persons should have in the basic institutions of society. These conditions make mutually advantageous cooperation both possible and necessary and, for this reason, give point to the role of justice. If they did not hold, “there would be no occasion for the virtue of justice” (TJ 110). The circumstances of justice capture the relations in which persons ind themselves without assuming any particular theory of human motivation. In particular, there is no assumption that the need for principles of distributive justice arises because persons are egoistic. On the contrary, these conditions describe the relations in which individuals stand to each other regardless of their particular motivations.

Rawls divides these circumstances into two kinds: objective and subjective. The objective circumstances are the following: individuals share a deined geographical territory; they are roughly equal in physical and mental powers or, at least, their capacities are such that none can dominate the rest; they are vulnerable to attack and are subject to having their plans blocked by the united force of others; and they coexist in a condition of moderate scarcity, which means that resources are neither extremely abundant nor extremely scarce (TJ 109-110).