Political
What makes a society legitimate, fair, and worthy of allegiance?
Justice is order: each part of the soul and city fulfills its proper role under reason.
Political justice is tied to virtue, civic flourishing, and the purposes of communal life.
Legitimacy arises from consent, agreement, or hypothetical contract among free and equal persons.
Institutions should be judged by their consequences for aggregate well-being.
Justice cannot be separated from material relations, class power, labor, and ideology.
Political order must be tested against gendered power, exclusion, embodiment, and care.
Justice connects ethics to institutions. It asks whether political order is grounded in virtue, consent, utility, emancipation, equality, or critique of domination.
Because every social theory carries an image of human agency and knowledge, this problem also feeds back into debates about freedom and justification.