This review article discusses Brian Barry’s Why Social Justice Matters. On the opening page of A Theory of Justice, Rawls proclaims that “justice is the first virtue of social institutions.” Brian Barry follows Rawls not only in giving justice pride of place among his social concerns but also in focusing on justice of a distributive sort. For Barry as for Rawls, “the primary subject of justice is … the distribution of rights, opportunities and resources.” Those, Barry says, are “the three key ideas around which this book is organized.” This author argues that only someone under the spell of a philosophical system could remotely imagine that, in the arrangement of social affairs, distributive justice matters exclusively, or even quite so preeminently as Rawls and Barry sometimes suggest. Barry at least intermittently agrees. Although distributive justice is clearly his preeminent concern in Why Social Justice Matters and several works preceding it, there and elsewhere Barry also offers important pointers to the many other things that matter, apart from distributive justice narrowly construed. Reflecting upon these other elements of Barry’s own work can remind us of what all else matters and of some of the reasons why.
