A Comparative Study of Martyr Sadr and John Rawls's Theories about Justice

"Justice" is a concept that man has always craved for. Those theorizing about utopia have built their ideal society according to this concept. In the view of the holy Quran, justice is the aim of prophets’ mission. One of the most important aspects of justice is "distributive justice" or "economic justice". Proposing the theory of "justice as fairness", the philosopher, John Rawls, tries to explain the concept of "justice" in the context of liberalism, a subject has been of special interest to researchers. Islam also pays special attention to "distributive justice" and Muslim scholars including Martyr Sadr, regards distributive justice as one of the three pillars of Islamic school of economics. Proposing the theory of "balance", martyr Sadr explains distributive justice from an Islamic perspective. This comparative study reviews these two theories and shows that, despite the superficial similarity between the two views about such topics like paying attention to distributive justice and status of the poor, there are important differences between the two including the difference in the source of justice, the difference in fundamentals, and the difference in the subject area. This study makes clear that considering the principles of Rawls’s theory, we find that it cannot be proposed and implemented in religious and non-liberal communities.