Abstract

This paper reflects on the idea that social institutions inform the development and justification of principles of justice. First, I situate this question in the context of contemporary debates in political philosophy. Then, I turn to a particular defense of this idea by looking at the conceptual relation established by John Rawls between the concept and the subject of justice. Finally, I look at works by Paul Ricœur in which he discusses Rawls’s theory of justice. Ricœur insists in various places on the distributive character of social institutions, in a way that helps shed light on the relation between principles and institutions