Abstract

A society that strives to be democratic must take seriously the fact that people disagree about matters of political right and must address the question of what, under such circumstances, justifies some judgments among others becoming state policy. In such a society, principles of political justice must, therefore, include principles--procedural or substantive--concerning how competing political judgments are to be represented and differences regulated. But what is the ethical grounding of these governing principles themselves? And in what sense must they themselves be "representative"? ;This dissertation examines a particular kind of answer that has often been given to these questions, and the conception concerning the nature of political justice which it implies. It has often been supposed that there is, beneath our political differences, a distinct perspective or way of representing our lives that embodies the foundational political identity of each person. Governing principles of political justice are thus, on this understanding, constituted by this perspective, and fundamental judgments of political justice are made from, or interpretations of, this distinct perspective. ;The dissertation explores this notion of political justice through an examination of several noted contemporary accounts that rely on it, including the political theories of John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin, and several of the dominant positions in the contemporary debate over the nature and interpretation of the U.S. Constitution. In each case, it is shown, first, how the account in question relies on the notion of political justice as a distinct point of view and secondly, how each account runs into trouble in trying to show how this distinct point of view in fact represents the foundational political identity of each person. ;The final chapter then asks what it would mean to abandon this idea that there is a distinct way of representing our lives that is politically foundational for each person. It argues that doing so would not imply that political systems could not be just, but would bring to the fore of theorizing about political justice a different set of questions, particularly concerning the role of various institutions in the on-going articulation of who we are politically.