There certainly is considerable disagreement about justice, as well as about many other things But surely to say that there is no agreement about justice is hyperbolic. While there is considerable disagreement about distributive justice, the rights of property, the death penalty, and the like, there is striking consensus today about a number of matters for instance, that slavery is (very) wrong and that persons have certain basic rights not to be killed or not to be restricted in their liberties without cause, that torture is rarely, if ever, to be used, that it is wrong to threaten or to harm the innocent. Often disagreement about justice concerns the specification of widely accepted principles. For instance, all to the contemporary controversies about abortion, assisted suicide, and the death penalty presuppose that killing generally is wrong. There is considerable disagreement at the margins, but a significant core agreement seems to exist Even if many norms require determination or specification for instance. norms prohibiting theft or trespass will always require application to new and puzzling cases there are some norms of justice which seem to be widely acceptable and applicable prior to the establishment of familiar legislative and judicial institutions. It seems that we might very well be able to evaluate our states by many of the norms of justice.