How do you create a fair society? Who deserves to rule? What rights do citizens have? How are those rights protected? What does it mean to act morally within society? These are the kinds of questions political philosophers furrow their brows and scratch their chins trying to answer. In 1971, an American philosopher named John Rawls introduced a new answer: justice as fairness. 

Michele Moody-Adams is the Joseph Straus Professor of Political Philosophy and Legal Theory at Columbia University. She is the author of Fieldwork in Familiar Places: Morality, Culture and Philosophy.

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