Will never get over how, for ToJ era Rawls, human society is basically just a big corporation for generating stuff (not just goods and services, but prestigious jobs, etc.), and the real aim of justice is to ascertain how to divvy up the plunder.

It’s legitimately perverse.

The real break from the Aristotelian tradition is that the latter sees society as a scheme of cooperation without which distinctively *human* life is impossible--no man is an island, and so on--and that to pursue human life in society immerses one in a thick web of obligation.

Aristotle was really a comparative politics scholar. He sent underlings out to bring back data on the constitutions and institutions of the polities of the Greek world. To be immersed in a society was to be immersed in a *particular* society, with given norms and institutions.

To be born into a society is to take up an obligation to support and advance the norms and institutions which make *that* society work--not because, viewed from some rationalistic view from nowhere, it's the best or most just possible polity--but because it's the one you inhabit.

I'm going a bit beyond Aristotle himself here, but: there's something distinctively lib-brained, in the philosophical sense of 'lib,' in undertaking the sort of radical critique of the constitutive institutions of a given social order.

"The Senate is irredeemably unjust." What? What does that even mean? It's one of the constitutive institutions of our social order, and has been for almost the entirety of that order's existence. What are the more important building blocks of our society it *really* contradicts?