What philosophical texts and other work would you recommend to someone who was trying to get a feel for the major contours of the debate of "justice?" Is that too large a subject to try to encompass? Is it a speciality in philosophy?

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Others on the panel know moreabout this topic than I do, but since this question has gone unansweredfor several days, here is one non-expert’s answer.

The most important 20th-century work on Justice within the Anglo-American philosophical tradition is undoubtedly John Rawls’ Theory of Justice (1971). Rawls is primarily concerned with the issue of distributive justice– the question of how limited resources within a community could befairly allocated among its members. Rawls contends that a justdistribution is one in which all citizens have basic rights andliberties, and in which social and economic inequalities are arrangedso as to be of greatest benefit of the leastadvantaged members of society. Rawls’ original book is difficult butreadable even by non-specialists.

One of the most influential critiques of Rawls can be found in Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia (1974). Nozick maintains that what makes a distribution justis simply that it was arrived at as the result of a series ofindividually just transactions: no particular pattern of distributionis mandated or ruled-out in advance.

Introductorycourses on the theory of justice typically include selections from eachof these books, along with historical sources – often includingselections from Plato’s Republic, Hobbes’ Leviathan, Locke’s Second Treatise on Government, and John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism—and contemporary writers – often including selections from Michael Sandel’s Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, and feminist writers such as Susan Moller Okin.

Aparticularly nice anthology – which includes selections from many ofthe texts listed above, along with a well-assembled collection ofadditional readings – is Robert Solomon and Mark Murphy (eds.) What is Justice? Classic and Contemporary Readings (Oxford 2000), whose table of contents can be viewed here.

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