Schmidtz David. Elements of Justice

Cambridge University Press, 2006. — 255 p.What is justice? Questions of justice are questions about what people are due, but what that means in practice depends on context. Depending on context, the formal question of what people are due is answered by principles of desert, reciprocity, equality, or need. Justice, thus, is a constellation of elements that exhibit a degree of integration and unity, but the integrity of justice is limited, in a way that is akin to the integrity of a neighborhood. A theory of justice is a map of that neighborhood.
David Schmidtz is Professor of Philosophy, joint Professor of Economics, and Director of the Program in Philosophy of Freedom at the University of Arizona. He is the author of Rational Choice and Moral Agency and coauthor, with Robert Goodin, of Social Welfare and Individual Responsibility. He is editor of Robert Nozick and coeditor, with Elizabeth Willott, of Environmental Ethics: What Really Matters, What Really Works. His lectures on justice have taken him to twenty countries and six continents.