One advantage of adopting the construal of justice as the domain of rights is that it promisesto furnish us with a sharper and more accurate grasp of justice within the domain of value. Inparticular, it enables us to differentiate principles of justice from other moral values, evenobligation-imposing values, such as charity. When he comes to articulating how justice is onevalue among others, and how it may enter into conflict with those other values, Hart largelylimits himself to the potentially confused idea that justice may conflict with the generalwelfare of society (pp.166-7). One problem here is that this idea seems to presuppose, ormake most sense on, a broadly utilitarian reading of the general welfare. On an alternative,Aristotelian construal of general welfare or the common good, the idea of such a conflict isproblematic, because justice is itself a component of that common good.
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In one way, Hartagrees with this last point, because he states that it is a requirement of distributive justice thatdecisions for the common good must impartially consider the claims of all affected (p.167).But this sounds like a reversion to the idea of justice in the universal sense, which fails to pick out justice as one moral value among others. This impression is confirmed when Hart cites the
claim of S.I. Benn and R.S. Peters that ‘the criterion for calling a rule a moral rule is that it is
the pr
oduct of reasoned and impartial consideration of the interests of those affected’ (p.302).Alternatively, Hart’s point may be interpreted as identifying justice with the observance of
duties arising out of the rights of others, which is in essence the view I have advocated in thissection.