Book Review: Considering Social Justice: A Review of David Miller's Principles of Social Justice

Miller's volume is a useful, thorough, and innovating overview of the subject of social justice. It inspires three lines of critical response. The first involves the symbiotic role of philosophy and empirical inquiry in the analysis of justice. The second involves the qualities of opportunity that ought to underlie justice. Finally, there are a few lessons regarding the status of justice in the overall evaluation of society that can be learned from the case of the United States, which has an anomalously bad record with respect to distributive justice. The centrality of politics is one of the implications of the analysis.