Rawls maintains that the basic structure of society is the irst subject of justice. A society is a more or less independent, closed and self-suficient, ongoing system of cooperation between persons within which it is ordinarily possible for a person to live out a complete life. A society’s basic structure is the network or system of institutions, taken as a whole and in dynamic relation to one another, that forms the institutional background within which individuals and associations interact with one another. It includes political and legal structures, economic systems, civil society, the family, and so on. It is the total institutional structure of a society as an ongoing cooperative venture carried out by a particular people.

A conception of justice for the basic structure of society is a conception of social justice. Social justice concerns justice in the production and distribution of the goods for the sake of which a people cooperates within and through the basic structure of its society. Rawls distinguishes social justice from local or transactional justice (a conception of justice for a particular kind of institution or transaction within a society), on the one hand, and international justice (a conception of justice for the relations between societies), on the other. He begins, but does not end, his inquiry into justice with an inquiry into social justice. Rawls’s two principles specify a conception of social justice, “justice as fairness.”