John Rawls’s justice as fairness includes a theory of distributive justice for the basic structure of society – the collection of background social, economic, and political institutions within which citizens pursue their everyday activities. Rawls understands the concept of distributive justice to specify a property of these institutions. A basic social structure is distributively just when it properly balances the competing claims of citizens on it, understood as a cooperative system for the production and distribution of certain primary social goods (TJ 4–5). Importantly, for Rawls distributive justice does not specify a property of any particular allocation of primary social goods to nameable individuals. With respect to primary social goods, he understands the solution to this problem to be a matter of pure procedural justice: that is, a just allocation of primary social goods to nameable individuals is just whatever allocation follows from the fair procedure of their freely acting within, and in accord with the rules of, a distributively just basic social structure.

Rawls aims to identify the conception of distributive justice most appropriate for a democratic society, that is, a society within which each and every citizen has as a free equal the same claim on its basic social structure understood as a system of cooperation for the mutually advantageous production and distribution of primary social goods. As principles of distributive justice, Rawls’s two principles of justice purport to specify key constraints on the institutional structure of a society within which the claims of all citizens, taken simply as free equals, are properly balanced at the most basic level.