Giving such a foundational role to institutions for the assessment of social justice, in the way that David Gauthier does, may be some¬what exceptional, but there are many other philosophers who have been clearly tempted in that direction. There is evidently considerable attraction in assuming institutions to be inviolable once they are imagined to be rationally chosen by some hypothetical just agree¬ment, irrespective of what the institutions actually achieve. The gen¬eral point at issue here is whether we can leave matters to the choice of institutions (obviously chosen with an eye to results to the extent that they enter the negotiations and agreements) but without ques¬tioning the status of the agreements and of the institutions once the arrangements have been chosen, no matter what the actual conse-quences prove to be.*