On Rawls’s Distinction between Perfect and Imperfect Procedural Justice

Abstract

Rawls’s distinction between perfect and imperfect procedural justice relies on the notion of a procedure that is guaranteed to lead to a certain independently specifiable result. Clarification of this notion shows that it makes the distinction between perfect and imperfect procedural justice unreal, in the following sense: whether, in a particular case, we have an instance of perfect or imperfect procedural justice depends only on how we choose to specify the procedure that is being followed.