We are all moral creatures. Perhaps we may live human lives without seriously confronting death. But while we are alive, we cannot avoid making sense of life’s meaning by locating ourselves in time. Some will elaborate narratives about their past, present and future. Others will look at these hyper-organized accounts with disdain or despair, and content themselves with more fragmentary stories. But without any sense of past, present, future we are nothing. So much is obvious. But it is less obvious how our ongoing effort at temporal self-location shapes thinking about justice. I elaborate three temporal horizons that we are continuously using to make sense of our lives. Each horizon frames time in a different way, irreducible to the others. Each is irreplaceable. We must make our peace with all three, despite their potential conflicts with the others. As we explore two of these horizons, we find ourselves on a path that leads to new insights into an old idea – that there is a basic difference between corrective and distributive justice. Exploring a third will lead us into less familiar, but equally fundamental terrain: I shall call it the sphere of relational justice.
