Abstract

Basic justice is needed everywhere, but the traditional criteria of substantive justice, such as liberty, equality, efficiency, or‘justice as fairness’etc., is challenged in contemporary society because of the ruin of the traditional metaphysics and religions. Habermas’s theory of discourse perhaps provides us a way to set a criterion for the post-metaphysical time. Justice is the union of the content and form. However, what his viewpoint on justice emphasizes is only the form of justice; he fails to consider the substance of justice, even for the criterion of substantive justice. In the post-metaphysical society of pluralized values, we can obtain the criterion of substantive justice from his theory of justice. This criterion is the discursive consensus.