The previous chapter concluded that the quest for economic justice is best understood as a search for some general framework of rules and principles regulating the terms on which individuals may claim and institutions adjust holdings of wealth. We saw that such rules, and their recognition and acceptance among members of a society, define a “division of responsibility” with respect to economic activity. Such rules will typically determine, for example, responsibilities to respect others' property, to acknowledge the right of specific agencies to tax individuals' wealth under certain conditions, to ensure that private and public organizations providing important social services have access to adequate resources, and the like. The question is how such rules should be configured if they are fully to realize the ideal of social justice among people who accept and live by them.

It is important to emphasize that, in formulating the question this way, we are not directly evaluating existing social institutions by the lights of some already settled criterion of justice. Rather, we are asking which set of rules and principles is worthy of serving as such a criterion among members of a political community. In our discussion of skepticism in chapter 1, we noticed that different societies and cultures have often differed over what counts as just and unjust conduct, which allocations of social responsibility ought to be recognized as just rather than unjust. To take a very vivid economic example, many human societies have practiced slavery.