ABSTRACT
Justice has been increasingly used as the main category in the discipline of political theory to investigate the normative foundation of public life and the legitimacy of political institutions, practices and processes recent years. The normative authority of political justice requires moral justification and groundwork for its connnection with the moral self. This article will discuss this problem of moral justification of political justice by focusing on John Rawls’ distributive and Axel Honneth’s recognitive theories of justice. Rawls’ justice as fairness, which expresses the moral background culture of liberal-democratic societies as abstract, universal and formal principles through reinterpretating the model of social contract, is not specifically concerned with the constitution of moral self and how political subjects are normatively related themselves with an idea of justice. Honneth does indeed give special attention to this moral dimension of justice by linking justice with the ideas of the good and autonomy through the theory of recognition. However his cultural-institutional interpretation of the good and justice is burdened with its own particularity, parochialism and limits. The current article argues that the limits and tensions of both theories of justice originate in taking the autonomous self as the premise for their ideas on morality, justice and subjectivity. The article also argues that this premise of autonomous self should be overcome in order to understand the constitution of moral self and its significance for developing an idea of political justice as a normative and critical understanding of public and political life.