Introduction

For decades the idea of justice in prices was largely ignored by philosophers and social scientists, being almost the exclusive domain of historians of ideas. Contemporary work on jurisprudence on the one hand, and at the intersection of politics, economics and philosophy, on the other, shows a renewed interest on the idea of just prices. The driving force of this renewed interest seems to be economic practice itself. In effect, our experience as market agents points toward situations in which the price of a certain good seems intuitively wrong, either because it is exorbitant, a ‘rip-off, ‘too much’, or, at the other extreme, because it is ‘a bargain’ or ‘too little’. Whether it is a professional extracting enormous profits for a job he would be willing to do for less, a seller charging more for a good because she knows how intensely the buyer wants it, a buyer taking advantage of the ignorance of the seller to buy cheap a costly item, it seems there are real-life instances where the price paid for some goods does not match the price they ought to possess, i.e., their just price.