Justice

Justice

MODERN ACCOUNTS OF JUSTICE

JUSTICE AND UTILITARIANISM

RAWLS’S THEORY OF JUSTICE

OBJECTIONS TO RAWLS’S THEORY

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Justice is a moral quality of individuals and of institutions, whereby they give equality of respect to persons and strive to preserve the rights of all. Along with wisdom, courage, and moderation, justice was considered by ancient Greek as well as medieval Christian and Islamic thinkers to be a cardinal virtue. In the Republic, Plato (c. 427–347 BCE) portrays justice as the right ordering of the parts of the individual soul and the groups of persons in the city. Aristotle (384–322 BCE) devoted a central chapter of the Nicomachean Ethics to the virtue of justice. He distinguished between general justice, which is the complete exercise of all the virtues in one’s treatment of other persons, and special justice, which is both the fair distribution of honors, wealth, and other goods, and fairness in the exchange of goods. Later tradition followed Aristotle by distinguishing between distributive justice (justice in the allotment of commonly held goods) and commutative justice (justice in exchange and in rectification of injuries). Distributive justice is governed, for Aristotle, by equality, but not by identical treatment for all. If “the people involved are not equal, they will not [justly] receive equal shares” (Aristotle 1985, p. 123). Whether one is wealthy, of good birth, or virtuous are among the factors that are believed by different people to affect one’s just share of common goods, according to Aristotle.

Medieval philosophers followed the Greeks in defining justice as part of the natural law, those laws governing human actions that are founded in reason, in the human need to live in societies, and ultimately in a divine ordering of the universe.

MODERN ACCOUNTS OF JUSTICE

Modern political philosophy, although still sometimes using the language of natural law theories, transposed the discussion of justice into a social contract framework of thought. The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) argued in Leviathan (1651) that prior to the establishment of a government, people lived in a state of nature, a state of war in which their lives and property were utterly insecure. In the state of nature, justice and injustice did not exist: “Therefore before the names of just, and unjust can have place, there must be some coercive power, to compel men equally to the performance of their covenants, by the terror of some punishment” (Hobbes [1651] 1962, p. 113). Justice, for Hobbes, has its ground in self-preservation and self-interest. John Locke (1632–1704) argued in the Second Treatise of Government (1690) that even in the state of nature people have a natural right to life, liberty, and property. The rulers, once the commonwealth is established, are obligated, according to Locke, to preserve these natural rights of individuals. Thus justice, for Locke, predates the establishment of the government and places some constraints upon the actions of those in power.

JUSTICE AND UTILITARIANISM

Utilitarian philosophy, resting as it does on the principle that the rightness of actions and of social institutions depends on the degree to which they promote human happiness, has often been charged with disregarding justice. Because the happiness of the greatest number could, at least in theory, result from unjustly depriving a minority of their rights or even of their lives, utilitarianism is often accused of failing to account for intuitive and traditional judgments about justice toward individuals. In defense of utilitarianism, John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) argued in Utilitarianism (1863) that the claims of justice, including individual rights to life, liberty, and property, as well as the right of individuals to be dealt with truthfully and impartially, are fully compatible with utilitarianism. Because there can be no security for anyone unless each is treated justly, Mill argued, justice is the foundation of any society that seeks to promote the general happiness. Mill acknowledged widespread disagreement over such issues as whether those with greater talents or skills should be rewarded better than those without and whether taxes should be assessed based on the ability to pay or as an equal share.

A number of questions emerge from the foregoing sketch of historical views of justice: Should justice be considered a social convention or does it have a basis in natural or divine law? To what extent does justice, which demands that everyone be treated in some sense equally, admit that different treatment is appropriate in different cases? What are the differences (e.g., of individual merit or of need) that appropriately lead to differences in treatment?

RAWLS’S THEORY OF JUSTICE

The American philosopher John Rawls (1921–2002) was the twentieth century’s most influential thinker concerning these questions. In A Theory of Justice (1971), Rawls argued that justice is at its basis a matter of fairness. Justice, for Rawls, is “the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought” (Rawls [1971] 1999, p. 3). Rawls’s theory advocates a form of procedural justice, meaning that justice results from following a fair procedure, where there is no separate measure of what a just outcome would be. In the tradition of social contract theory, Rawls describes a hypothetical “original position” in which free and equal parties agree to the principles of justice by which society will be governed. To ensure fairness, the choice is made behind a “veil of ignorance” in which each of the contracting parties is denied knowledge of certain facts about themselves. None of them knows “his place in society, his class position or social status, nor does anyone know his fortune in the distribution of natural assets and abilities, his intelligence, strength, and the like” (p. 11). The parties are ignorant of their gender, and they do not know to what generation they belong. They know that when the veil is lifted they will have some conception of the good, that their notions of the good life will require some measure of resources to carry them out, and that those resources will be somewhat scarce.

Once the agents of the original position have been presented with a variety of available conceptions of justice, Rawls argues that they would adopt what he calls the two principles of justice. “First: each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive scheme of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar scheme of liberties for others. Second: social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both (a) reasonably expected to be to everyone’s advantage, and (b) attached to positions and offices open to all” (Rawls [1971] 1999, p. 53). Rawls gives priority to the first of these principles, such that basic liberties “can be restricted only for the sake of liberty” (p. 266). He refines the second principle (termed “the difference principle”) to say that inequalities are to be “to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged” (p. 266). As a result of adopting these principles of justice, Rawls defends a liberal constitutional democracy in which the government protects basic liberties and oversees the just distribution of resources. The principles of justice led Rawls, in his 2001 book Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, to criticize welfare and laissez-faire capitalism, as well as state socialism having a “command economy,” in favor of “property-owning democracy” and “liberal socialism” (Rawls 2001, p. 138).

In his 1993 book Political Liberalism, Rawls argues that the principles of justice are subject to an overlapping consensus, that is, that they are acceptable from the perspective of many different philosophical or religious systems of thought. In this way, Rawls advances the discussion of the principles of justice without requiring a decision on whether justice is ultimately a matter of social convention or of natural or divine law.

Though not a strict egalitarian (for he allows inequalities as long as they are to the advantage of the least well-off), Rawls views as unjust any distribution of goods that serves only to better the conditions of those possessing greater natural or social advantages than others. It is important to note that, for Rawls, individual endowments such as talent, wealth, and social standing are arbitrary gifts of fortune rather than individual possessions or entitlements. The “difference principle” ensures that those who possess such advantages will not be able to translate them into a greater share of society’s goods at the expense of those who are less advantaged. Thus, on the question of whether merit, need, or some other criterion should become the basis for the distribution of social goods, Rawls asks that we remember that what appears to be an individual’s “merit” is generally the result of luck rather than desert.

OBJECTIONS TO RAWLS’S THEORY

Rawls’s work has been widely praised and criticized. Communitarian critics, such as Michael Sandel, have objected that the parties in the original position are artificially deprived of the knowledge that membership in a particular community is essential to their identities, leading to an overly individualistic account of justice. Libertarians, including Robert Nozick (1938–2002), viewed Rawls’s principles as leading to infringements of individual liberty because of Rawls’s willingness to redistribute social goods that were initially obtained through what libertarians view as legitimate means (e.g., not obtained through deceit or coercion). Advocates of Catholic social teaching, along with other religiously oriented thinkers, have objected that Rawls’s thought relegates religious belief to the private sphere, thereby denying the important role of religious faith in the promotion of social justice. The feminist political thinker Susan Moller Okin (1946–2004) argued that Rawls overlooked the need for justice within families. Advocates of capability ethics, including Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, criticized Rawls for stressing the equal distribution of goods without noting the differing degrees to which society enhances or undermines individuals’ capacities to make use of those goods. (Nussbaum has, in her own work, extended the discussion of justice to include questions of justice toward the disabled, toward nonhuman animals, and across international boundaries.) Despite these and other objections, Rawls’s theory, with its powerful defense of individual rights and its attention to the claims of the disadvantaged, continues to exert a commanding influence on contemporary ethical and political thought.

SEE ALSO Democracy; Egalitarianism; Equality; Justice, Distributive; Locke, John; Rawls, John; Social Contract; Utilitarianism

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aristotle. 1985. Nicomachean Ethics. Trans. Terence Irwin. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett.

Hobbes, Thomas. [1651] 1962. Leviathan, or the Matter, Form, and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiastical and Civil, ed. Michael Oakeshott. New York: Collier.

Locke, John. [1690] 1980. Second Treatise of Government, ed. C. B. Macpherson. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett.

Mill, John Stuart. [1863] 2002. Utilitarianism, 2nd ed., ed. George Sher. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett.

Rawls, John. [1971] 1999. A Theory of Justice, rev. ed. Cambridge, MA: Belknap.

Rawls, John. 1993. Political Liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press.

Rawls, John. 2001. Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, ed. Erin Kelly. Cambridge, MA: Belknap.

Paulette Kidder