The paper analyzes circumstances of justice as an element of J. Rawls’ theory of justice. The term is used to indicate a particular social and communicative context where principles of justice lose their normative force and give way to a different set of standards to guide the behavior of moral agents. Attempts to carry out principles of justice beyond this context are generally classified as morally indifferent or morally impermissible actions. Rawls borrowed the idea and partly the nomenclature of circumstances from D. Hume who thought that the absence of conditions in which men are normally placed renders justice “totally useless” and “suspends its obligation upon mankind”. They are as follows: moderate scarcity of recourses, limited benevolence to others, relatively equal capacity to inflict harm, and need for cooperation and possibility to cooperate. According to Hume’s restricted understanding of justice, the loss of the normative force affects only principles of legitimate ownership. Rawls puts the circumstances of justice in a different theoretical and normative context. They become a crucial part of his contractual theory of justice (an information available to parties of the hypothetical contract) and begin to limit principles that determine not only legitimate ownership but the distribution of all social resources and opportunities. The main modification of the circumstances proposed by Rawls is a replacement of the limited benevolence condition by the condition of the conflict between conceptions of good. The introduction of the circumstances of justice into the Rawlsian social ethics influences his solution of many problems pertaining to interspecies, intergenerational, international, and partly gender justice. The necessity of this introduction is not self-evident. It should be tested both against the content of justice as a moral value and against the foundations of the contractualism.