From the very start of inquiry into right and wrong, justice has been understood to involve not what happens of necessity, independently of the wills of individuals, but only what lies within the power of voluntary action. The classic liberal theoreticians and their contemporary followers have treated freedom as a foundation of justice, as if freedom were a privileged principle from which the relations of justice should be derived. The quest for an ethics of freedom provides liberal theory with its starting point: the will conceived as a given agency, whose character stands defined prior to any actual volition, and whose right is to be realized as the first principle of justice.