The ephemeralist theory of justice challenges a foundational tenet of modern liberal political theory: that justice is the primary virtue of social institutions.

In the writings of John Rawls and his many followers, political goods in general (and much of the rest of morality) routinely get treated as having their basis in a broader human capacity to discern the norms of social justice. In Mark Silcox's alternative account, justice is better understood as an adaptive and historically situated norm, instrumentally useful, but ultimately provisional. Even if justice is rightly viewed as the most exalted goal of political life in the contemporary world, this situation is fundamentally ephemeral, insofar as our very sense of what makes the norms of justice authoritative is inseparable from an impulse to seek out conditions under which this authority might be superseded. Philosophers in the modern liberal tradition have often (following Hume) characterized justice as a fundamentally artificial concept, one that only arises as a topic of concern for human beings in certain contingent economic and psychological circumstances. But Rawls's efforts to treat justice thus conceived as the “first virtue” of human societies are misguided and philosophically indefensible. The forms of intellectual artifice involved in constructing and holding ourselves accountable to norms of justice should not also be regarded as establishing the outermost boundaries of the moral imagination.

The ephemeralist theory treats the concept of justice as tied inexorably to the circumstances of its origin, and as destined to cede its normative authority to other, latterly emergent demands of morality as historical circumstances change.