Others on the panel know moreabout this topic than I do, but since this question has gone unansweredfor several days, here is one non-expert’s answer. The most important 20 th -century work on Justice within the Anglo-American philosophical tradition is undoubtedly John Rawls’ Theory of Justice (1971). Rawls is primarily concerned with the issue of distributive justice – the question of how limited resources within a community could befairly allocated among its members. Rawls contends that a justdistribution is one in which all citizens have basic rights andliberties, and in which social and economic inequalities are arrangedso as to be of greatest benefit of the leastadvantaged members of society. Rawls’ original book is difficult butreadable even by non-specialists. One of the most influential critiques of Rawls can be found in Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia (1974). Nozick maintains that what makes a distribution justis simply that it was arrived at...

Here (http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/2005/10/anti_same_sex_m.html) is another attempt to offer such an argument, with second thoughts by the author here (http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/2005/10/uncle_kvetch_is.html ).