Some understand utopia as an ideal society in which everyone would be thoroughly
informed by a moral ethos: all would always act on their pure conscientious
judgments about justice, and so it would never be necessary to provide
incentives for them to act as justice requires. In this essay I argue that such
a society is impossible. A society of purely conscientiously just agents would
be unable to achieve real justice. This is the Paradox of Pure
Conscientiousness. This paradox, I argue, can only be overcome when individuals
are prepared to depart from their own pure, conscientious, judgments of
justice.