Question

John Rawls's concept of justice is a:

• A. Legal Concept
• B. Political Concept
• C. Sociological Concept
• D. Philosophical Concept

Answer 1

The Correct Option is B

The Correct Option is (B): Political Concept.

Answer 2

The question asks how John Rawls's concept of justice is best classified. Rawls himself addressed this directly, especially in his later work, when he clarified how justice as fairness should be understood.

1. Legal Concept: Rawls's theory of justice as fairness is not built around existing positive law or legal doctrine, it is a normative framework for evaluating the basic structure of society, so classifying it as a legal concept misplaces its actual field.
2. Political Concept: in "Political Liberalism" (1993), Rawls explicitly recast justice as fairness as a "political conception of justice", meaning it is meant to apply to the basic structure of society and to be justifiable to citizens holding different comprehensive moral, religious, or philosophical views, without depending on any one of those views being true. This is Rawls's own explicit label for his theory.
3. Sociological Concept: Rawls's method is normative political philosophy, working through devices like the original position and the veil of ignorance to derive principles of justice, not empirical sociology describing how societies actually behave.
4. Philosophical Concept: while justice as fairness certainly belongs to philosophy in a broad sense, Rawls specifically moved away from grounding it in a comprehensive philosophical or metaphysical doctrine, and instead described it as political, not metaphysical, precisely to distinguish it from being tied to one comprehensive philosophical worldview.

Rawls's own later writing settles this by name, he describes justice as fairness as a political conception designed to be acceptable across different comprehensive doctrines, rather than as a legal, sociological, or purely metaphysical one.

So the correct answer is Political Concept.