Is there a place for what isn’t fair? A proposal for the justification of moral judgements

Abstract The purpose of this essay is to reflect on the problem of moral justification and its relation to the idea of justice. It is argued that, as a predicate of moral judgments, the idea of justice involves two ethical requirements articulated among themselves: the first indicates the aspiration to guarantee a non-arbitrary meaning for the norms that we ought to obey; the second reflects an emphasis on the doubly consensual character and universalizability of these norms. Finally, it is concluded that the challenge of reciprocal consent, a condition for normative consensus, is linked to a constructive sense of morality, around which the notion of justice can assume an equally pedagogical value for moral agents.