Justice is probably the most commonly invoked value in contemporary political philosophy, and social justice is perhaps the most frequently discussed variant of this value. Rival theories of social justice abound, varying across multiple dimensions, but one feature very many accounts share is that they focus on describing and defending what each account takes to be the perfectly just society. Borrowing terminology coined by John Rawls, let us call any theory that purports to describe the perfectly just society an ideal theory of social justice, and let us call any account that seeks to explain how it is that perfect social justice is to be achieved or worked towards a nonideal theory. Rawls famously focuses most of his scholarly attention on developing the former, and only a very small proportion of his work is concerned with the latter. This is not because Rawls holds the implausible view that nonideal theory is somehow uninteresting or unimportant. He insists that the issues covered by nonideal theory are ‘the pressing and urgent matters… the things we are faced with in everyday life’. Instead, Rawls’s stated rationale for focusing primarily on ideal theory over nonideal theory is that this ‘offers the only basis for the systematic grasp of these more pressing problems’ (Rawls 1999a:8). As he puts it: ‘until the ideal is identified… nonideal theory lacks an objective, an aim, by reference to which its queries can be answered’ (Rawls 1999b:90). Perhaps unsurprisingly given his influence in contemporary political philosophy, Rawls’s position on the priority of ideal over nonideal theory is emblematic of a wider literature in which there are very many rival accounts of the perfectly just society, but comparatively little has been said about how it is that perfect social justice is to be achieved or progressed towards from real-world circumstances that all agree are unjust
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