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Abstract
China does not have a unified and consistent ethical understanding. Ethics have to be mostly conceived and applied in personal terms. At the negotiation table, parties bring their own moral principles and values from their cultural background, education, and experience. Justice principles anchored in Chinese moral philosophy clearly take precedence over legal justice principles. For a Chinese negotiator, striking a deal is a process of balancing between two contradictory sets of values: Confucius' notions of rightness, and those of modern distributive (and procedural) justice. Now, distributive justice implies a whole range of criteria, such as rewards according to efforts, merits, and contribution, as well as need. Equality is still not on the Chinese justice agenda. Fairness has to find its own way between guanxi requirements, traditional nepotism, the influence of symbols, propitious numbers, references to ancestors, feng shui, and astrology.

G.A. Cohen argues that Rawlsian constructivism mistakenly conflates principles of justice with optimal rules of regulation, a confusion that arises out of how Rawls has us think about justice. I use the concepts/conceptions distinction to argue that while citizens may reasonably disagree about the substance and demands of justice, some principled convergence may be possible: we can agree upon regulative principles consistent with justice, as each of us understands it. Rawlian constructivism helps us find that principled convergence, and this too is a conception of justice. G.A. Cohen pense que le constructivisme confond les principes de justice avec les règles de régulation optimale, une confusion qui découle de la manière dont Rawls pense la justice. En utilisant la distinction entre les concepts et les conceptions, j'affirme que, bien que les citoyens puissent raisonnablement contester la substance et les exigences de la justice, un accord de principe est possible: nous pouvons convenir de principes régulateurs compatibles avec la justice, comme chacun de nous la comprend. Le constructivisme Rawlsien nous aide à trouver cet accord de principe, et cela aussi est une conception de la justice.

Certain sorts of disputes about principles of distributive justice that have occupied a great deal of attention in recent political philosophy turn out to be fundamentally unresolvable, when they are conducted in ignorance of whether an important subclass of basic social goods exists within any particular society. I employ the folktale 'Stone Soup' to illustrate how such distributional goods might come into existence. Using the debate about John Rawls's Difference Principle as an example, I argue that a proper appreciation for the axiological status of these goods shows that disputes about principles (at least as these have been conducted within the Rawlsian tradition) should be relegated to a subsidiary status relative to other, more fundamental concerns about the ethics of economic distribution.

In recent years, several political theorists have argued that reasonableprinciples of justice are practice-dependent. In this paper it is suggested that we can distinguish between at least two main models for doing practice-dependent theorizing about justice, interpretivism and constructivism, and that they can be understood as based in two different conceptions of practices. It is then argued that the relianceon the notion of participants that characterizes interpretivism disablesthis approach from adequately addressing certain matters of justiceand that a better way of developing the idea of practice-dependencecan be found in a constructivism that starts from the Rawlsian idea ofoverlapping consensus, but which shifts the focus of that approachfrom societies to a more open-ended category of domains, and whichunderstands the parties to a possible overlapping consensus as stakeholdersin a certain set of interconnected practices.