Back to the Good Life: Towards an Enlarged Conception of Social Justice

Abstract

Social justice has returned to the geographical agenda, but in an intellectual environment different from that in which ‘radical geography’ emerged more than two decades ago. The author attempts to (re)integrate the notion of social justice with some broader conception of the good life. An egalitarian formulation of distributive justice is posited, to set the scene for an argument that its application requires reference to the way of life in which it is embedded. Postapartheid South Africa is used for illustrative purposes. It is argued that the interdependence of distributional and relational aspects of justice might find fruitful expression in a universal ethic of care, as a central feature of a good way of life.