Current Theoretical Debates
This page continues where the Overview of Global Justice page leaves off. Below are additional, more detailed entries that expand on several of the key points central to current debates regarding the relationship between domestic justice and global justice. This page includes discussions of what makes a social problem a matter of justice rather than merely a matter of good public policy or a moral issue of some other sort, such as beneficence, charity, humanitarian assistance and so on. The discussion continues on page 2 with coverage of issues of moral responsibility in a global age, moral responsibility for structural injustice, and variety of points of contention that divide cosmopolitans, statists, and hybrid theorists, and more.
Justice and Rights: A Conceptual Connection?
Out of Print, sadly
In the introductory materials on the Global Justice Overview page, I said that many of the current debates about human rights and social justice run parallel to one another. There are of course limited points of contact. In Rawls's A Theory of Justice, for example, we find the idea that social justice is concerned with the distribution of rights and duties, as well as the benefits and burdens of social cooperation within a society. And in his Law of Peoples, we find references to a minimum set of human rights that all well-ordered states should secure for its citizens. But there is no extended attempt to spell out in detail how human rights are related to the more general idea of how justice as a special category of morality.
Thus, an overarching question often ignored in debates about what justice demands is this: What is justice, and in what way does it mark a distinct moral category?
Sometimes ‘just’ and ‘unjust’ are used as rough synonyms for right and wrong, but generally we reserve ‘injustice’ to signify some special sort of moral failing. But what sort of failing? Philosophers disagree among themselves. Ordinary usage also varies greatly. My aim is not to resolve these conceptual debates. My more modest aim is to survey some of the main ways that justice is conceptualized. The hope is that we might find within this contested conceptual terrain a number of useful diagnostic tools for determining whether some decision context poses potential issues of justice.
There are many shorthand slogans to be found, and we should recognize the limits of each.
The list is seemingly endless. Complaints about the multiple meanings of justice have a long history. Aristotle tried to sort out the matter in Book V of his Nichomachean Ethics roughly 2400 years ago. Classical Greek as well as most modern European languages reveal ambiguities in ordinary usage. Aristotle begins with the observation that sometimes 'justice' and 'injustice' are used as rough synonyms for right and wrong. Justice in its most common sense in his time referred to a virtue of persons, but his point is that it can encompass a number of differing types of character assessment. One kind of justice-cum-virtue has to do with the proper relationships among equals, especially among citizens of a polis who are by nature said to be free and equal. But justice among citizens is not the only form of personal virtue. How one treats others, including parents and children, even slaves, and non-citizens can be said to be a matter of justice 'in a sense." But justice is primarily a matter of how one treats fellow citizens who are free and equal. While Aristotle offers some useful ways of distinguishing various forms of justice as an individual virtue, he also muddies the waters a bit by sometimes speaking of justice as if it were the sum of all personal virtues. Thus, we get a general sense of justice as excellence in all aspects of one's relationships with others - giving all his or her due - and the various specific senses of justice as a personal virtue.
Our focus here, however, is not on personal virtue. Aristotle also discusses the idea of "political justice" which is a form of moral appraisal of a political association rather than of individual character. Political justice pertains to an association of free and equal citizens who live together under a common legal system and for the sake of the common good. Thus, societies as well as individuals can be described as just or unjust. Moreover, assessments of political justice are synoptic: they identify the totality of ways the society overall may be judged as just or unjust. A perfectly just social arrangement, then, is one in which all of the virtues are reflected within the overarching legal structure within which the common good is pursued.
Thus, we see as far back as Aristotle divergent senses of justice, some that pertains to the assessment of individual character and one that pertains to the overall assessment of what today we would describe as the most basic structural features of a society. Missing, however, from Aristotle's analysis are discussions of the modern moral idiom of rights.
Nonetheless, there are deep conceptual connections between rights and justice to be found within contemporary philosophical literature. In the discussion below I refer to the enduring legacies of J. S. Mill and Aristotle because many of their ideas are the starting points of current debates. And the debates are both varied and vigorous. The common denominator, as we shall see, is that both rights and justice often get elucidated in Aristotelian terms of what persons "are due" from others.
Justice, according to Aristotle, is a matter of individuals or institutions giving everyone his or her due. Critics often claim that this is an empty and unhelpful idea. It fails to tell us exactly what it is that someone is due. But this dismissal misses the point. What this abstract formulation does is provide us with a way of distinguishing claims of justice from other moral notions. As a way of illustrating some potential differences, consider the following three statements in a more contemporary vein:
• There are things that conscientious persons morally ought to do;
• There are things that would make the world a better place were some things done by someone or other.
• There are things or types of treatment that some identifiable person is due from some other identifiable person or institution.
The third statement picks up on Aristotle’s idea of what someone can claim against another as her due. It signifies more than a criticism of someone’s character or a criticism of an action that falls short of what a morally conscientious person’s duty. It signifies more than the judgment that it is desirable that a state of affairs be improved.
In more modern parlance, we are likely to follow Joel Feinberg (see image for his classic book) in saying that what someone is due is what someone is entitled to as a matter of right, and for which a failure of someone to fulfill it is the source of a particularly strong complaint. It is a claim of injustice, not a mere claim about someone's personal moral failure or individual character deficiency. Claims of justice are rights-claims made against another person, institution, or both. Justice and the idea of individual rights are thus conceptually linked on this familiar (but not uncontroversial) view.
J.S. Mill is perhaps the most famous modern era philosopher best known for equating justice and rights and it is Mill's account of rights from chapter V of Utilitarianism that Feinberg follows as well. On Mill's view, not every moral failing warrants the label ‘injustice.’ Only those failings that involve a harm to some “vital human interest.” On his view, rights are moral claims of special weight and social significance. They are grounded in some interest of such gravity that in the ordinary course of human events causing harm – and in some instances, even a failure to prevent or mitigate harms of the relevant sort - to those interests constitutes an injustice. The task, then, on what has been called the "interest theory of rights" is to identify what counts as a vital human interest of such weight that they "trump" or at least warrant a very high presumption in its favor when in competition with other morally significant considerations.
Not everyone follows Feinberg and Mill in every detail. For example, many argue that injustice need not involve an actual harm to an identifiable person, but a violation of a general norm grounded in the vital interests of persons that are in the ordinary course of things put at risk of harm. These variations aside, theirs is still one of the most common ways of demarcating at least a very large part of what is unique to the domain of justice. Many contemporary human rights approaches rely upon it to explain what makes duties of justice distinct from duties of charity, beneficence, or humanitarian assistance.
Thus, an overarching question often ignored in debates about what justice demands is this: What is justice, and in what way does it mark a distinct moral category?
Sometimes ‘just’ and ‘unjust’ are used as rough synonyms for right and wrong, but generally we reserve ‘injustice’ to signify some special sort of moral failing. But what sort of failing? Philosophers disagree among themselves. Ordinary usage also varies greatly. My aim is not to resolve these conceptual debates. My more modest aim is to survey some of the main ways that justice is conceptualized. The hope is that we might find within this contested conceptual terrain a number of useful diagnostic tools for determining whether some decision context poses potential issues of justice.
There are many shorthand slogans to be found, and we should recognize the limits of each.
- 1. Justice is about basic rights or entitlements.
- 2. Justice involves principles of fair distribution of benefits and burdens.
- 3. Justice is concerned with equality within relationships such that none is dominated by others.
The list is seemingly endless. Complaints about the multiple meanings of justice have a long history. Aristotle tried to sort out the matter in Book V of his Nichomachean Ethics roughly 2400 years ago. Classical Greek as well as most modern European languages reveal ambiguities in ordinary usage. Aristotle begins with the observation that sometimes 'justice' and 'injustice' are used as rough synonyms for right and wrong. Justice in its most common sense in his time referred to a virtue of persons, but his point is that it can encompass a number of differing types of character assessment. One kind of justice-cum-virtue has to do with the proper relationships among equals, especially among citizens of a polis who are by nature said to be free and equal. But justice among citizens is not the only form of personal virtue. How one treats others, including parents and children, even slaves, and non-citizens can be said to be a matter of justice 'in a sense." But justice is primarily a matter of how one treats fellow citizens who are free and equal. While Aristotle offers some useful ways of distinguishing various forms of justice as an individual virtue, he also muddies the waters a bit by sometimes speaking of justice as if it were the sum of all personal virtues. Thus, we get a general sense of justice as excellence in all aspects of one's relationships with others - giving all his or her due - and the various specific senses of justice as a personal virtue.
Our focus here, however, is not on personal virtue. Aristotle also discusses the idea of "political justice" which is a form of moral appraisal of a political association rather than of individual character. Political justice pertains to an association of free and equal citizens who live together under a common legal system and for the sake of the common good. Thus, societies as well as individuals can be described as just or unjust. Moreover, assessments of political justice are synoptic: they identify the totality of ways the society overall may be judged as just or unjust. A perfectly just social arrangement, then, is one in which all of the virtues are reflected within the overarching legal structure within which the common good is pursued.
Thus, we see as far back as Aristotle divergent senses of justice, some that pertains to the assessment of individual character and one that pertains to the overall assessment of what today we would describe as the most basic structural features of a society. Missing, however, from Aristotle's analysis are discussions of the modern moral idiom of rights.
Nonetheless, there are deep conceptual connections between rights and justice to be found within contemporary philosophical literature. In the discussion below I refer to the enduring legacies of J. S. Mill and Aristotle because many of their ideas are the starting points of current debates. And the debates are both varied and vigorous. The common denominator, as we shall see, is that both rights and justice often get elucidated in Aristotelian terms of what persons "are due" from others.
Justice, according to Aristotle, is a matter of individuals or institutions giving everyone his or her due. Critics often claim that this is an empty and unhelpful idea. It fails to tell us exactly what it is that someone is due. But this dismissal misses the point. What this abstract formulation does is provide us with a way of distinguishing claims of justice from other moral notions. As a way of illustrating some potential differences, consider the following three statements in a more contemporary vein:
• There are things that conscientious persons morally ought to do;
• There are things that would make the world a better place were some things done by someone or other.
• There are things or types of treatment that some identifiable person is due from some other identifiable person or institution.
The third statement picks up on Aristotle’s idea of what someone can claim against another as her due. It signifies more than a criticism of someone’s character or a criticism of an action that falls short of what a morally conscientious person’s duty. It signifies more than the judgment that it is desirable that a state of affairs be improved.
In more modern parlance, we are likely to follow Joel Feinberg (see image for his classic book) in saying that what someone is due is what someone is entitled to as a matter of right, and for which a failure of someone to fulfill it is the source of a particularly strong complaint. It is a claim of injustice, not a mere claim about someone's personal moral failure or individual character deficiency. Claims of justice are rights-claims made against another person, institution, or both. Justice and the idea of individual rights are thus conceptually linked on this familiar (but not uncontroversial) view.
J.S. Mill is perhaps the most famous modern era philosopher best known for equating justice and rights and it is Mill's account of rights from chapter V of Utilitarianism that Feinberg follows as well. On Mill's view, not every moral failing warrants the label ‘injustice.’ Only those failings that involve a harm to some “vital human interest.” On his view, rights are moral claims of special weight and social significance. They are grounded in some interest of such gravity that in the ordinary course of human events causing harm – and in some instances, even a failure to prevent or mitigate harms of the relevant sort - to those interests constitutes an injustice. The task, then, on what has been called the "interest theory of rights" is to identify what counts as a vital human interest of such weight that they "trump" or at least warrant a very high presumption in its favor when in competition with other morally significant considerations.
Not everyone follows Feinberg and Mill in every detail. For example, many argue that injustice need not involve an actual harm to an identifiable person, but a violation of a general norm grounded in the vital interests of persons that are in the ordinary course of things put at risk of harm. These variations aside, theirs is still one of the most common ways of demarcating at least a very large part of what is unique to the domain of justice. Many contemporary human rights approaches rely upon it to explain what makes duties of justice distinct from duties of charity, beneficence, or humanitarian assistance.
Justice: Rights or Fairness: An Outcome versus a Procedural Orientation - Bridging the Divide
click image for link
Mill's theoretical influence continues today. Some philosophers, however, dissent in part from Mill's conceptual equation of rights and justice. The dissenters argue that the whole of justice is not defined by rights. James Griffin, for example, in his book On Human Rights, suggests that there may be forms of unfairness in the distribution of benefits and burdens without a rights violation. In fact, one reason that discussions about social justice and human rights often seem to run on parallel tracks is the fact that since Rawls published A Theory of Justice many philosophers tend to think about justice through the lens of fairness in the design of social institutions within which persons affected by them pursue their own ends. In one sense, ideas of some sort of fair process or fair procedure has come to seem central what justice within a society is all about within the social justice tradition. But equally prominent in the human rights literature is the idea of the core demands of justice as the minimum condition of well-being that define the rights which must be secured for everyone.
Even among the dissenters from views that equate rights and justice, all agree that violation of a moral right - especially one so important that we recognize it as a basic human right subject to some international mechanism of legal enforcement - is a paradigmatic form of injustice. What we often see is a difference in emphasis. Human rights tend to focus less on fair procedures and more on the outcomes that justice requires. In particular, the focus is on the minimum levels of well-being that should be secured for everyone. And thus in one sense, concerns with fairness seem to be central to a theory of social justice, while the outcome-orientation is the perspective that human rights brings into special focus. Indeed, it is Mill's emphasis on vital human interests that are of special moral significance that drives much of that discussion within human rights theory. An overall theory of justice, it seems, needs the dual focus each perspective offers most centrally. It needs the focus on fairness in the design of social structural arrangements that theories of social justice, following Rawls, provides, and the focus on outcomes that the literature on human rights provides.
The special moral significance of rights is only part of what explains the special standing that rights as central concerns of justice have within our moral vocabulary. In addition, rights are correlated with what are often called "directed duties." That is to say, rights are often thought of as individualized claims against identifiable others who have some correlative duties, and in some cases we think that some of the rights we have - basic human rights - are moral claims against everyone. We think, for example, that every innocent person has a right not to be killed and that the right is claimable by everyone against everyone. Some rights we call basic rights or human rights - are said to be doubly universal: claimable by all persons against all persons.
Mill goes further in his analysis of rights, and contemporary theories of human rights are influenced heavily by what he has to say about the connection between an individual's most important rights and the moral relationship between the state and the individual. Whatever rights we have are not only claims against particular others for non-intervention, or perhaps even for assistance, but claims also against the state to enforce or guarantee their fulfillment. Thus, a curious feature of combining Mill's coupling of an individual's basic rights-claims and its ancillary right-claim against state with the idea of double universality is that it assumes that the state occupies a special role intermediate between the individual whose vital interests are to be protected by the state and everyone else who bears duties toward everyone else. Mill's conception thus seems to build the idea of a state's special duty into the very notion of what it means to have a right.
Henry Shue elaborates on this last Millian point in his book, Basic Rights. To claim a right is not only to make a claim on individuals for the performance of some individualized duty, but at its moral core, it is to make a claim on others that they see to it that some institutional structure be put in place for their fulfillment. Shue's point is embedded in many human rights documents as well. So for example, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, for the most part, implicitly follows Mill’s suggestion that moral rights pertain to our most vital interests, and the ancillary assumption is that governments have primary responsibility for their assurance for their own citizens. If nothing else, we can read Shue as providing us with the basis for bridging the gap between the outcomes and procedural orientation. Rights, properly understood, refer not only to outcomes that constitute the minimum demands of justice. A central feature of what it is to claim a right is the claim also to certain social arrangements that provide fair chances for the realization of the valuable outcomes that rights identify by way of an account of vital human interests. Typically, we think of the nation-state as the primary duty-bearer with respect to requirements of institutional protection, but whether some other supranational entities might step into that role is an open question.
Critics of the Universal Declaration, of course, argue that the authors fall short of their own best understanding of their task by including both the most profound interests (e.g., right not to be tortured) with the comparatively trivial (e.g., rights to paid holidays). Nonetheless, claims of justice and human rights are the primary moral currency of the aggrieved, perhaps as much or more in the developing, non-Western world as in the developed Western nations, and much of the public rhetoric of human rights is directed toward individual governments and the demand that they secure those rights for their own citizens.
Increasingly, rights-claims are expanding to include matters not accounted for within the Universal Declaration or most philosophical accounts of rights. In Millian language, we might say that the list of what counts as a vital human interest is expanding to reflect an evolving understanding of vital human interests of the sort that are threatened in the ordinary course of modern life such that a heightened degree of moral and legal protection is warranted. Proposed additions to the lists of human rights to be recognized within international law include such things as the right to water.
Even among the dissenters from views that equate rights and justice, all agree that violation of a moral right - especially one so important that we recognize it as a basic human right subject to some international mechanism of legal enforcement - is a paradigmatic form of injustice. What we often see is a difference in emphasis. Human rights tend to focus less on fair procedures and more on the outcomes that justice requires. In particular, the focus is on the minimum levels of well-being that should be secured for everyone. And thus in one sense, concerns with fairness seem to be central to a theory of social justice, while the outcome-orientation is the perspective that human rights brings into special focus. Indeed, it is Mill's emphasis on vital human interests that are of special moral significance that drives much of that discussion within human rights theory. An overall theory of justice, it seems, needs the dual focus each perspective offers most centrally. It needs the focus on fairness in the design of social structural arrangements that theories of social justice, following Rawls, provides, and the focus on outcomes that the literature on human rights provides.
The special moral significance of rights is only part of what explains the special standing that rights as central concerns of justice have within our moral vocabulary. In addition, rights are correlated with what are often called "directed duties." That is to say, rights are often thought of as individualized claims against identifiable others who have some correlative duties, and in some cases we think that some of the rights we have - basic human rights - are moral claims against everyone. We think, for example, that every innocent person has a right not to be killed and that the right is claimable by everyone against everyone. Some rights we call basic rights or human rights - are said to be doubly universal: claimable by all persons against all persons.
Mill goes further in his analysis of rights, and contemporary theories of human rights are influenced heavily by what he has to say about the connection between an individual's most important rights and the moral relationship between the state and the individual. Whatever rights we have are not only claims against particular others for non-intervention, or perhaps even for assistance, but claims also against the state to enforce or guarantee their fulfillment. Thus, a curious feature of combining Mill's coupling of an individual's basic rights-claims and its ancillary right-claim against state with the idea of double universality is that it assumes that the state occupies a special role intermediate between the individual whose vital interests are to be protected by the state and everyone else who bears duties toward everyone else. Mill's conception thus seems to build the idea of a state's special duty into the very notion of what it means to have a right.
Henry Shue elaborates on this last Millian point in his book, Basic Rights. To claim a right is not only to make a claim on individuals for the performance of some individualized duty, but at its moral core, it is to make a claim on others that they see to it that some institutional structure be put in place for their fulfillment. Shue's point is embedded in many human rights documents as well. So for example, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, for the most part, implicitly follows Mill’s suggestion that moral rights pertain to our most vital interests, and the ancillary assumption is that governments have primary responsibility for their assurance for their own citizens. If nothing else, we can read Shue as providing us with the basis for bridging the gap between the outcomes and procedural orientation. Rights, properly understood, refer not only to outcomes that constitute the minimum demands of justice. A central feature of what it is to claim a right is the claim also to certain social arrangements that provide fair chances for the realization of the valuable outcomes that rights identify by way of an account of vital human interests. Typically, we think of the nation-state as the primary duty-bearer with respect to requirements of institutional protection, but whether some other supranational entities might step into that role is an open question.
Critics of the Universal Declaration, of course, argue that the authors fall short of their own best understanding of their task by including both the most profound interests (e.g., right not to be tortured) with the comparatively trivial (e.g., rights to paid holidays). Nonetheless, claims of justice and human rights are the primary moral currency of the aggrieved, perhaps as much or more in the developing, non-Western world as in the developed Western nations, and much of the public rhetoric of human rights is directed toward individual governments and the demand that they secure those rights for their own citizens.
Increasingly, rights-claims are expanding to include matters not accounted for within the Universal Declaration or most philosophical accounts of rights. In Millian language, we might say that the list of what counts as a vital human interest is expanding to reflect an evolving understanding of vital human interests of the sort that are threatened in the ordinary course of modern life such that a heightened degree of moral and legal protection is warranted. Proposed additions to the lists of human rights to be recognized within international law include such things as the right to water.
Duties of Humanity and Duties of Justice: Does the Difference Matter?
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The existence of a clear distinction between duties of justice and duties of humanity, while widely embraced, is not accepted by all theorists who write about obligations of the affluent to the global poor. Peter Singer, for example, highlights no such distinction. His account relies on a single, utilitarian-inspired principle. In its strongest version (he offers both weak and strong versions) each person has an individual duty to assist others in need when doing so does not sacrifice something of comparable moral importance. This is the strong version of the principle, and it can be quite demanding. What exactly is of comparable moral importance in the everyday lives of the global affluent when weighed against the interests of the desperately poor? It is unclear just what counts as something of comparable moral importance. We can imagine a duty that is fulfilled only when the sacrifice begins to reduce the utility of the affluent to a level on par with the rising utility of the recipient. A number of claims flow from this.
To the extent that we operate with this single principle, universal moral requirement, it makes little practical difference whether we denominate the duties as accompanied by rights-claims. We have a significant duty no matter what. But this way of framing global duties reveals a blindspot. On such a view, it makes no practical difference how the poor became poor or how the affluent became affluent. Matters of entitlement, either among the affluent or the poor, are not relevant to the content of the duty. Fulfillment of duties might be achieved most efficiently through collective actions of states or through individual action, and thus the assignment of duty is determined solely by considerations of efficiency.
Issues of distribution for the sake of some other aim, such as securing or preserving equality in relationships among citizens, do not seem to figure as the deeper explanation of why redistribution from the affluent to the badly off matters on Singer's principle. The only notion of equality that Singer appears to draw upon is the equality of all persons as potential recipients of the assistance of others when in need. Whether or not there is any sort of ongoing relationship between the global poor and the affluent has no bearing on the existence or demandingness of the duty. Nothing matters except the existence of need on the one hand and the corresponding capacity of others to meet that need.
Singer's widely discussed proposal for dealing with global poverty, then, is orthogonal to most of the debates among statists, cosmopolitan justice theorists, and hybrid accounts inasmuch as the central terms of their debate are irrelevant. The obligations simply exist, apart from any facts about common nationality or further social purposes transfer of resources might facilitate. The debates between statists - this who think that duties of broadly egalitarian social justice apply only domestically - and their critics, then, depend heavily on the positions that they take on a family of issues that tend to mark important distinctions between duties of justice and other moral duties having global reach, even if we cannot say with precision exactly what differences are criterial. But one thing we do know is absent in Singer's view: a distinct right of the global poor to the creation of social arrangements. Instead, they merely have a claim on a portion of our resources rather than a claim on us to secure institutional arrangements that might alter the very distribution of those resources in the first place.
To the extent that we operate with this single principle, universal moral requirement, it makes little practical difference whether we denominate the duties as accompanied by rights-claims. We have a significant duty no matter what. But this way of framing global duties reveals a blindspot. On such a view, it makes no practical difference how the poor became poor or how the affluent became affluent. Matters of entitlement, either among the affluent or the poor, are not relevant to the content of the duty. Fulfillment of duties might be achieved most efficiently through collective actions of states or through individual action, and thus the assignment of duty is determined solely by considerations of efficiency.
Issues of distribution for the sake of some other aim, such as securing or preserving equality in relationships among citizens, do not seem to figure as the deeper explanation of why redistribution from the affluent to the badly off matters on Singer's principle. The only notion of equality that Singer appears to draw upon is the equality of all persons as potential recipients of the assistance of others when in need. Whether or not there is any sort of ongoing relationship between the global poor and the affluent has no bearing on the existence or demandingness of the duty. Nothing matters except the existence of need on the one hand and the corresponding capacity of others to meet that need.
Singer's widely discussed proposal for dealing with global poverty, then, is orthogonal to most of the debates among statists, cosmopolitan justice theorists, and hybrid accounts inasmuch as the central terms of their debate are irrelevant. The obligations simply exist, apart from any facts about common nationality or further social purposes transfer of resources might facilitate. The debates between statists - this who think that duties of broadly egalitarian social justice apply only domestically - and their critics, then, depend heavily on the positions that they take on a family of issues that tend to mark important distinctions between duties of justice and other moral duties having global reach, even if we cannot say with precision exactly what differences are criterial. But one thing we do know is absent in Singer's view: a distinct right of the global poor to the creation of social arrangements. Instead, they merely have a claim on a portion of our resources rather than a claim on us to secure institutional arrangements that might alter the very distribution of those resources in the first place.
The Very Idea of Social Justice
A classic Statement of Skepticism
Social justice is about the design of social arrangements, and Shue's account of the heart of human rights claims is that it is a claim against others for the creation of just institutions. But there are critics of the very idea of social justice. The origins of modern discussions of social justice are often traced to the concept of “giustizia sociale,” first articulated in 1840 by the Jesuit priest, Luigi Taparelli d’Azeglio and made known more widely with the publication of Antonio Rosmini’s La Costituzione secondo la giustizia in 1848. A secular treatment appeared several years later in John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism (1861), where he refers to his principle of utility as “the highest abstract standard of social and distributive justice; towards which all institutions, and the efforts of all virtuous citizens, should be made in the utmost degree to converge.” Among early twentieth century political theorists such as L.T. Hobhouse the central issue of social justice was the proper distribution of advantages and disadvantages among individuals, whose lives are highly interdependent and whose life prospects are therefore markedly affected by the web of social and institutional arrangements that bind them together.
All discussions of social justice with its distinctive focus on fairness of social arrangements now begin with the canonical work of philosopher John Rawls. In his famous dictum, justice is the “first virtue of social institutions” (A Theory of Justice, 1999a, 3). Social justice, on his account, is a concerned with fairness in the design of the “basic structure of society” (1999a 7, 53), by which he means the major institutions and social arrangements within a single society, understood as “a more or less self-sufficient association of persons bound together by rules that specify a system of cooperation” (1999a 4).
For Rawls, a society is a normatively unique form of human interaction inasmuch as the shared understanding among its participating members is that a society is a co-operative venture for mutual advantage (1999a 4, 109). Because a satisfactory life for anyone is possible only through complex and enduring processes of social cooperation (1999a 88, 109), and because social cooperation enables the production of a greater sum of benefits than would be possible for persons acting on their own, distributive principles are needed for determining the proper division of social and economic advantages (1999a 4, 53).
In Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, Rawls adds renewed emphasis to the claim that the cooperative character of social organization is the “most fundamental idea” (2001, 5) or “central organizing idea” of his theory (2001, 25). More precisely, a society within which principles of social justice apply is conceived as a fair system of cooperation over time, extending from one generation to the next (Rawls 2001, 5, 18). In The Law of Peoples (1999b) Rawls reaffirms a normatively laden empirical assumption implicit throughout A Theory of Justice. Members of a particular society have moral standing to assert claims of distributive justice against one another because domestic political and economic arrangements are unique in their influence on the life prospects of individuals affected by them and they participate in an arguably unique form of social cooperation (1999b, 107-118).
Social justice is therefore cast as a set of requirements of distributive justice inasmuch as its principles are meant to regulate the distribution of various kinds of primary social goods, including liberties, opportunities, and all-purpose resources such as income and wealth. The conclusions of Rawls’s arguments are well-known. Basic liberties should be equal (the Principle of Equal Basic Liberties); inequalities in opportunities attributable to morally arbitrary causes should be compressed (the Fair Equality of Opportunity Principle); and income and wealth should be distributed so as to maximize the share available to the worst-off members of society (the Difference Principle). His overarching conclusion is that the totality of social arrangements must be beneficial to every fully co-operating citizen, including the least advantaged (1999a, 179), and the set of distributive principles he defends thus provides the desiderata by which those arrangements might be judged as just.
Among the most fundamental objections are those from critics who oppose the very idea of social justice as a distinct category of morality. Robert Nozick (Anarchy, State, and Utopia 1974), for example, argues for the implausibility of any “patterned conception of justice” that has as its aim some preferred distributive outcome. The objection is that its orientation treats the cumulative consequences of the actions of many separate individual moral agents as potentially unjust, even when those actions involve no wrongdoing or breach of individual moral duty. For Nozick, as long as there is no injustice in the acquisition or transfer of resources, then whatever distributive pattern in resources or opportunities emerges from voluntary transactions and agreements is just.
Frederick Hayek (Law, Legislation, and Liberty, vol. 2, The Mirage of Social Justice, 1976) argues similarly that virtues, properly understood, are ascribable only to individual moral agents because “only human conduct can be called just or unjust” (31). “To speak of justice always implies that some person or persons ought, or ought not, to have performed some action” (33). But instances of social injustices refer to states of affairs characterized by inequalities (for example, in well-being, opportunities, economic rewards, and so on), for which there are no identifiable agents who can be held individually accountable for unjust actions. Moreover, a theory of social justice cannot be rescued from incoherence by treating government as a moral agent. As Hayek puts it, “the demand for ‘social justice’ is addressed not to the individual but to society – yet society, in the strict sense in which it must be distinguished from the apparatus of government, is incapable of acting for a specific purpose” (64).
All discussions of social justice with its distinctive focus on fairness of social arrangements now begin with the canonical work of philosopher John Rawls. In his famous dictum, justice is the “first virtue of social institutions” (A Theory of Justice, 1999a, 3). Social justice, on his account, is a concerned with fairness in the design of the “basic structure of society” (1999a 7, 53), by which he means the major institutions and social arrangements within a single society, understood as “a more or less self-sufficient association of persons bound together by rules that specify a system of cooperation” (1999a 4).
For Rawls, a society is a normatively unique form of human interaction inasmuch as the shared understanding among its participating members is that a society is a co-operative venture for mutual advantage (1999a 4, 109). Because a satisfactory life for anyone is possible only through complex and enduring processes of social cooperation (1999a 88, 109), and because social cooperation enables the production of a greater sum of benefits than would be possible for persons acting on their own, distributive principles are needed for determining the proper division of social and economic advantages (1999a 4, 53).
In Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, Rawls adds renewed emphasis to the claim that the cooperative character of social organization is the “most fundamental idea” (2001, 5) or “central organizing idea” of his theory (2001, 25). More precisely, a society within which principles of social justice apply is conceived as a fair system of cooperation over time, extending from one generation to the next (Rawls 2001, 5, 18). In The Law of Peoples (1999b) Rawls reaffirms a normatively laden empirical assumption implicit throughout A Theory of Justice. Members of a particular society have moral standing to assert claims of distributive justice against one another because domestic political and economic arrangements are unique in their influence on the life prospects of individuals affected by them and they participate in an arguably unique form of social cooperation (1999b, 107-118).
Social justice is therefore cast as a set of requirements of distributive justice inasmuch as its principles are meant to regulate the distribution of various kinds of primary social goods, including liberties, opportunities, and all-purpose resources such as income and wealth. The conclusions of Rawls’s arguments are well-known. Basic liberties should be equal (the Principle of Equal Basic Liberties); inequalities in opportunities attributable to morally arbitrary causes should be compressed (the Fair Equality of Opportunity Principle); and income and wealth should be distributed so as to maximize the share available to the worst-off members of society (the Difference Principle). His overarching conclusion is that the totality of social arrangements must be beneficial to every fully co-operating citizen, including the least advantaged (1999a, 179), and the set of distributive principles he defends thus provides the desiderata by which those arrangements might be judged as just.
Among the most fundamental objections are those from critics who oppose the very idea of social justice as a distinct category of morality. Robert Nozick (Anarchy, State, and Utopia 1974), for example, argues for the implausibility of any “patterned conception of justice” that has as its aim some preferred distributive outcome. The objection is that its orientation treats the cumulative consequences of the actions of many separate individual moral agents as potentially unjust, even when those actions involve no wrongdoing or breach of individual moral duty. For Nozick, as long as there is no injustice in the acquisition or transfer of resources, then whatever distributive pattern in resources or opportunities emerges from voluntary transactions and agreements is just.
Frederick Hayek (Law, Legislation, and Liberty, vol. 2, The Mirage of Social Justice, 1976) argues similarly that virtues, properly understood, are ascribable only to individual moral agents because “only human conduct can be called just or unjust” (31). “To speak of justice always implies that some person or persons ought, or ought not, to have performed some action” (33). But instances of social injustices refer to states of affairs characterized by inequalities (for example, in well-being, opportunities, economic rewards, and so on), for which there are no identifiable agents who can be held individually accountable for unjust actions. Moreover, a theory of social justice cannot be rescued from incoherence by treating government as a moral agent. As Hayek puts it, “the demand for ‘social justice’ is addressed not to the individual but to society – yet society, in the strict sense in which it must be distinguished from the apparatus of government, is incapable of acting for a specific purpose” (64).
Distributive Inequalities and Status Inequalities
Anderson: Restricted Access Link
There are seemingly endless ways of carving up the intellectual landscape of debates about social justice. From Rawls, we think of social justice generically as fairness in the design and configuration of the basic social structure or social arrangements (such as political institutions and economic practices) affecting profoundly and pervasively the life prospects of its participants. We might, following Rawls, speak of social justice and distributive justice as roughly equivalent terms. A familiar Rawlsian claim is that justice, when it involves an assessment of social structural arrangements, pertains to the fair distribution of benefits and burdens. His principles are distributive. Sympathetic critics nonetheless think this shorthand statement is inadequate. Even if we think that the distributive characterization captures something essential to any reasonable account of social justice we might think it still falls short of illuminating all that we are interested in when assessing just social arrangements.
So we might ask further whether the point of social justice is some preferred pattern of distribution of various resources, opportunities, or advantages. Or, as many now argue, we might construe distributive concerns as theoretically secondary to more fundamental moral aims such as ensuring some measure of equality of social status or political standing. Those who argue for the theoretical primacy of equality of status within certain types of relationships tend to view distributional inequalities as unjust for purely instrumental reasons. Those who advocate for the primacy of relational equality or status equality over concerns about distributive inequalities are sometimes called "relational egalitarians." Relational equality or status equality, for example, is said to matter among co-nationals inasmuch as it is regarded as a core requirement of an ideal of democratic equality, and extreme differences in distributive inequalities are condemned insofar as they undermine democratic processes or allow some to dominate or oppress others.
Theories of justice that are criticized most heavily by relational egalitarians are versions of theories known as sufficiency theories or sufficientarian theories. Their claim is that there is some definable threshold of resource distribution that marks the focal aim of distributive justice and that, beyond that threshold, concerns about how some fare in relation to others are likely to be based in considerations of envy or other suspect motivations. Harry Frankfurt, for example claims that “if everyone had enough, it would be of no moral consequence whether some had more than others.” Once that threshold is reached for everyone, the job of justice is done.
However, a major objection to Frankfurt's version of sufficientarianism is that it ignores the prospect that such disparities may undermine relational ideals of democratic equality among citizens. For example, vast differences in resources can translate into vast differences in the capacity of individuals and groups for leading self-determining lives free from the domination and control of others or impede their ability to realize other valuable aspects of well-being. What is thought to be unfair in light of the Democratic Equality ideal are inequalities so great that some citizens are deprived of a comparable measure of ability enjoyed by the more fortunate citizens to set the ongoing terms of domestic social cooperation.
Elizabeth Anderson is perhaps the philosopher most closely associated with the Democratic Equality argument from her well-known essay "The Point of Democratic Equality" (Ethics,Vol. 109, No. 2, January 1999). We aim not for distributive equality but for equality of status and we judge the adequacy of distributive principles on the basis of whether everyone has enough resources necessary to secure a sufficient level of functional capabilities that are required for democratic citizenship. (So she is a sufficiency theorist as well but very different from Frankfurt).
However, Rawls's own distributive theory reflects deeper concerns about status inequalities as well. He argues that "free and equal citizenship" rules out relative inequalities of such magnitude that some persons are deprived of equal political standing. As Samuel Scheffler interprets Rawls on this point, the relational ideal of free and equal citizenship is “the core of the value [of equality as ] a normative conception of human relations.”
The importance of some notion of democratic equality as a constraint on permissible inequalities is undeniable, but arguably a more basic concern about extreme resource inequality requires us to look well beyond the importance of ensuring the equal standing of all in the democratic process within a single nation-state. The more basic concern that no one should be subjected to the dominating influences of others is a requirement of social justice having application beyond the confines of a single political system. It may be true, as a contingent matter, that persons related to one another as citizens under a common coercive legal authority often have more numerous and more substantial opportunities to oppress or dominate one another than they have for exercising a comparable degree of control over non-citizens. And it may be true that citizens committed to the ideals of democracy have developed expectations such that distributive inequalities that undermine democratic relations are limited because they are widely seen as unjust. But comparative capacities to dominate others are matters for empirical judgment, not conceptual truths about the nature of relationships among citizens within a nation-state, and the lack of an existing global expectation that one will not be subject to the dominance of another is no reason for thinking it less unjust.
So we might ask further whether the point of social justice is some preferred pattern of distribution of various resources, opportunities, or advantages. Or, as many now argue, we might construe distributive concerns as theoretically secondary to more fundamental moral aims such as ensuring some measure of equality of social status or political standing. Those who argue for the theoretical primacy of equality of status within certain types of relationships tend to view distributional inequalities as unjust for purely instrumental reasons. Those who advocate for the primacy of relational equality or status equality over concerns about distributive inequalities are sometimes called "relational egalitarians." Relational equality or status equality, for example, is said to matter among co-nationals inasmuch as it is regarded as a core requirement of an ideal of democratic equality, and extreme differences in distributive inequalities are condemned insofar as they undermine democratic processes or allow some to dominate or oppress others.
Theories of justice that are criticized most heavily by relational egalitarians are versions of theories known as sufficiency theories or sufficientarian theories. Their claim is that there is some definable threshold of resource distribution that marks the focal aim of distributive justice and that, beyond that threshold, concerns about how some fare in relation to others are likely to be based in considerations of envy or other suspect motivations. Harry Frankfurt, for example claims that “if everyone had enough, it would be of no moral consequence whether some had more than others.” Once that threshold is reached for everyone, the job of justice is done.
However, a major objection to Frankfurt's version of sufficientarianism is that it ignores the prospect that such disparities may undermine relational ideals of democratic equality among citizens. For example, vast differences in resources can translate into vast differences in the capacity of individuals and groups for leading self-determining lives free from the domination and control of others or impede their ability to realize other valuable aspects of well-being. What is thought to be unfair in light of the Democratic Equality ideal are inequalities so great that some citizens are deprived of a comparable measure of ability enjoyed by the more fortunate citizens to set the ongoing terms of domestic social cooperation.
Elizabeth Anderson is perhaps the philosopher most closely associated with the Democratic Equality argument from her well-known essay "The Point of Democratic Equality" (Ethics,Vol. 109, No. 2, January 1999). We aim not for distributive equality but for equality of status and we judge the adequacy of distributive principles on the basis of whether everyone has enough resources necessary to secure a sufficient level of functional capabilities that are required for democratic citizenship. (So she is a sufficiency theorist as well but very different from Frankfurt).
However, Rawls's own distributive theory reflects deeper concerns about status inequalities as well. He argues that "free and equal citizenship" rules out relative inequalities of such magnitude that some persons are deprived of equal political standing. As Samuel Scheffler interprets Rawls on this point, the relational ideal of free and equal citizenship is “the core of the value [of equality as ] a normative conception of human relations.”
The importance of some notion of democratic equality as a constraint on permissible inequalities is undeniable, but arguably a more basic concern about extreme resource inequality requires us to look well beyond the importance of ensuring the equal standing of all in the democratic process within a single nation-state. The more basic concern that no one should be subjected to the dominating influences of others is a requirement of social justice having application beyond the confines of a single political system. It may be true, as a contingent matter, that persons related to one another as citizens under a common coercive legal authority often have more numerous and more substantial opportunities to oppress or dominate one another than they have for exercising a comparable degree of control over non-citizens. And it may be true that citizens committed to the ideals of democracy have developed expectations such that distributive inequalities that undermine democratic relations are limited because they are widely seen as unjust. But comparative capacities to dominate others are matters for empirical judgment, not conceptual truths about the nature of relationships among citizens within a nation-state, and the lack of an existing global expectation that one will not be subject to the dominance of another is no reason for thinking it less unjust.
Duties of Humanity versus Duties of Justice: Some Lingering Questions
Some Commonly Ascribed Distinctions
We have seen several ways in which justice might be distinguished from other moral notions such as duties of beneficence, duties of humanity or humanitarian assistance, and otherwise uncategorized duties of the sort that Peter Singer describes. And we have seen doubts about whether the very idea of justice can be applied to social structural arrangements or only to the actions and character of intentional moral agents. And of course, the idea of justice extending beyond national boundaries is among the most controversial of current theoretical disagreements.
While perhaps there is no established univocal consensus on what, if anything, marks the distinction, there are enough ideas in play sufficient to help us see the range of what might be at stake that makes something a matter of justice. Here are a few of the main points that can help us see in rough terms some of what might be claimed. Perhaps there is little more than a family of ideas that we can draw upon in order to make sense of the global moral landscape. And perhaps there is overlap between duties of justice and duties of humanity. Our common humanity for example, could be the ground for some duties of both sorts. But different types of duties might flow from the same foundation. Consider some more options.
There is one obvious sense in which some such division between justice and humanity might make intuitive sense. For example, a familiar way of carving up moral duties is by way of the Kantian distinction between perfect and imperfect duties. There are many disputes about how the distinction should be understood, but a rough picture is sufficient for now. Perfect duties are ones that are determinate in both their content and the identification of the duty-bearer. Negative duties not to harm provide easy cases. They are doubly universal: they are owed by everyone to everyone. The identity of the duty-bearer is fixed. The content of the duty is reasonably determinate, say, in particular negative duties such as the duty not to kill innocent persons. But there are many imperfect duties, such as the general duty of beneficence or duty to aid others. But the content of that duty is indeterminate; what each person must do for the sake of others in need is not well-defined. And just who bears any particular duty of assistance is unclear. Some persons are better positioned to assist others, either by geographic proximity or capacities.
The perfect/imperfect distinction seems to be most at home in the context of what we previously called theories of interpersonal justice. Quite often the perfect/imperfect distinction is cashed out in terms of duties that correlate with rights claims and those that do not. To say that someone has a right is to say that someone has a (perfectly determinate) duty to that claimant. The claimant then has an entitlement. It is not a matter of mere charity or duties of beneficence or duties of humanitarian assistance that are in play. Fulfillment of duties correlated with rights are required, not optional in any way with the duty-bearer. Fulfillment then is a matter of justice and warrants a strong complaint when not met, not something that is in some respects up to the duty-bearer's discretion in its specific requirements and not something for which gratitude is owed when duties are satisfied. One powerful reason to demand a higher degree of determinacy of duties within a "theory of interpersonal justice" (see Current Theoretical Disagreements, p. 2) is that judgments of praise and blame for individuals is at issue, and in some cases, the appropriateness of sanctions and penalties for individual deviations from precise duties are plausible only when there is a basis for knowing what is expected of them. The demand for determinateness then seems to be a kind of fairness requirement embedded in notions of rights and duties that are individually assignable.
The idea that justice-based duties are a matter of right or entitlement, and not matters largely at the discretion of donor nations (terminology widely used in the literature on foreign aid and the status of contributor nations to the World Bank and IMF) employs the notion of rights, but it is used without any individualized assignment of responsibility. The global poor, or developing nations perhaps, claim something against the global affluent collectively then as an entitlement. But we may well ask whether the same demand for determinateness of duty that we reasonably seek in the case of theories of interpersonal justice is similarly required for theories of international justice or theories we described (on page 2 of Current Theoretical Disagreements) as primary actor theories that focus on states and other multinational and supranational entities. I will simply say that it is not obvious that lack of determinacy of the precise duty or identity of the duty bearer is a theoretical defect of the same sort that it would be in the interpersonal justice context.
Another familiar idea is that the aims of humanitarian assistance or beneficence is the well-being of individuals or more modestly, the alleviation of acute suffering and severe deprivation. Justice, by contrast, is focally concerned with the underlying structure of the social and economic arrangements within which distributions of the primary social determinants of well-being are made. In that sense, justice is understood in structural terms and pertains to the background conditions of ongoing human interactions. As Brian Barry puts it ("Justice and Humanity in Global Perspective"), the means most common to fulfilling duties of humanity often involve resource transfers from persons who are entitled to their holdings to those whose needs are great, while justice may well require more radical institutional reconfiguration and indeed, a wholesale reconsideration of the moral status that people claim for their resource holdings. If justice requires redistribution of resources or power, the demand is not that you give to others more of what you are morally entitled to keep for yourself (as it would seem in Singer's theory), but to surrender what you are not, in fact, entitled to retain under the circumstances. So even when (global) justice may be served by resource transfer, the point of such transfers is not exhausted by the humanitarian aim of improving the well-being of the worst-off; its further aim might be protection against certain forms of domination or securing fair terms of association. For example, it is sometimes argued that just distribution requires that no one or no group has so much resources or power that they can dominate or subjugate others. Or that none has so little that virtually all control over the most basic requirements of human life is forfeited.
Moreover, duties of humanitarian assistance may be more modest in the targeted level of well-being it requires than duties of justice. Duties of justice arguably aim for a secure level of well-being sufficient for a decent human life. Duties of humanitarian assistance may be better viewed as intended to secure only the basics of survival. Of course, some theories of human rights are very modest in what it counts of the minimum level of well-being to which all persons can rightfully expect under social arrangements. And so while it remains an open question just how high the level of well-being should be as a matter of justice, as well as the richness of the list of elements that must be secured, it is at least plausible to suppose that both the minimum level and minimum content of the list is more ambitious for a theory of justice than it is for a theory of humanitarian assistance.
The above suggestion gains plausibility when we think about the point of humanitarian assistance in contrast to the point of social justice. Duties of humanitarian assistance may be conceived as arising episodically with fulfillment having a clearly defined cut-off point (Rawls's phrase). Natural disasters, famines, and the like are paradigm examples. The connotation is that long-term assistance is not the moral expectation, even if as a matter of fact, severe need is locally entrenched and effective change is seemingly intractable. Justice might then seem more appropriate as a concern with the conditions under which well-being is realized securely over a longer time horizon and not simply focused on strategies for meeting acute need.
Moreover, most statists (those who deny the existence of any cross-border duties of distributive justice) are not entirely clear about what is contemplated in terms of the criterion of fulfillment when they speak of duties of humanity, as opposed to justice. For example, Michael Blake argues for humanitarian duties beyond borders, but the duties he contemplates are ones that have as endpoints a level of well-being for all sufficient for autonomous lives. The time horizon for fulfillment could be quite lengthy, and the practical requirements might entail some substantial alteration in structural arrangements. In terms of demandingness, Blake's account resembles the claims of many human rights theorists who argue that some minimum level of provision is a matter of universal human right grounded in the requirements of human agency (e.g., James Griffin's personhood account).
Thus, it seems that while both duties of humanity and duties of justice may overlap, both in underlying rationales and in their focus on well-being, there is a family of differences between the two that can be useful in drawing some serviceable practical distinctions. We have no definitive resolution. Disagreement persists. But we can see family resemblances among useful, illuminating, provocative ideas about what makes justice a special category of morality. Any or all might well be invoked in particular contexts as a way of aiding our moral diagnosis of situations or decision options. For me, it's not obvious that we need a single account of what makes a social problem one that raises questions of justice when the several accounts we have in play point to some features that any rich account of justice should have in view.
We can summarize these debates in tandem with the discussions above of justice as a matter of rights-claims with a few overarching points about the diversity of ways justice might be seen as normatively distinct from other moral notions.
We have seen several ways in which justice might be distinguished from other moral notions such as duties of beneficence, duties of humanity or humanitarian assistance, and otherwise uncategorized duties of the sort that Peter Singer describes. And we have seen doubts about whether the very idea of justice can be applied to social structural arrangements or only to the actions and character of intentional moral agents. And of course, the idea of justice extending beyond national boundaries is among the most controversial of current theoretical disagreements.
While perhaps there is no established univocal consensus on what, if anything, marks the distinction, there are enough ideas in play sufficient to help us see the range of what might be at stake that makes something a matter of justice. Here are a few of the main points that can help us see in rough terms some of what might be claimed. Perhaps there is little more than a family of ideas that we can draw upon in order to make sense of the global moral landscape. And perhaps there is overlap between duties of justice and duties of humanity. Our common humanity for example, could be the ground for some duties of both sorts. But different types of duties might flow from the same foundation. Consider some more options.
There is one obvious sense in which some such division between justice and humanity might make intuitive sense. For example, a familiar way of carving up moral duties is by way of the Kantian distinction between perfect and imperfect duties. There are many disputes about how the distinction should be understood, but a rough picture is sufficient for now. Perfect duties are ones that are determinate in both their content and the identification of the duty-bearer. Negative duties not to harm provide easy cases. They are doubly universal: they are owed by everyone to everyone. The identity of the duty-bearer is fixed. The content of the duty is reasonably determinate, say, in particular negative duties such as the duty not to kill innocent persons. But there are many imperfect duties, such as the general duty of beneficence or duty to aid others. But the content of that duty is indeterminate; what each person must do for the sake of others in need is not well-defined. And just who bears any particular duty of assistance is unclear. Some persons are better positioned to assist others, either by geographic proximity or capacities.
The perfect/imperfect distinction seems to be most at home in the context of what we previously called theories of interpersonal justice. Quite often the perfect/imperfect distinction is cashed out in terms of duties that correlate with rights claims and those that do not. To say that someone has a right is to say that someone has a (perfectly determinate) duty to that claimant. The claimant then has an entitlement. It is not a matter of mere charity or duties of beneficence or duties of humanitarian assistance that are in play. Fulfillment of duties correlated with rights are required, not optional in any way with the duty-bearer. Fulfillment then is a matter of justice and warrants a strong complaint when not met, not something that is in some respects up to the duty-bearer's discretion in its specific requirements and not something for which gratitude is owed when duties are satisfied. One powerful reason to demand a higher degree of determinacy of duties within a "theory of interpersonal justice" (see Current Theoretical Disagreements, p. 2) is that judgments of praise and blame for individuals is at issue, and in some cases, the appropriateness of sanctions and penalties for individual deviations from precise duties are plausible only when there is a basis for knowing what is expected of them. The demand for determinateness then seems to be a kind of fairness requirement embedded in notions of rights and duties that are individually assignable.
The idea that justice-based duties are a matter of right or entitlement, and not matters largely at the discretion of donor nations (terminology widely used in the literature on foreign aid and the status of contributor nations to the World Bank and IMF) employs the notion of rights, but it is used without any individualized assignment of responsibility. The global poor, or developing nations perhaps, claim something against the global affluent collectively then as an entitlement. But we may well ask whether the same demand for determinateness of duty that we reasonably seek in the case of theories of interpersonal justice is similarly required for theories of international justice or theories we described (on page 2 of Current Theoretical Disagreements) as primary actor theories that focus on states and other multinational and supranational entities. I will simply say that it is not obvious that lack of determinacy of the precise duty or identity of the duty bearer is a theoretical defect of the same sort that it would be in the interpersonal justice context.
Another familiar idea is that the aims of humanitarian assistance or beneficence is the well-being of individuals or more modestly, the alleviation of acute suffering and severe deprivation. Justice, by contrast, is focally concerned with the underlying structure of the social and economic arrangements within which distributions of the primary social determinants of well-being are made. In that sense, justice is understood in structural terms and pertains to the background conditions of ongoing human interactions. As Brian Barry puts it ("Justice and Humanity in Global Perspective"), the means most common to fulfilling duties of humanity often involve resource transfers from persons who are entitled to their holdings to those whose needs are great, while justice may well require more radical institutional reconfiguration and indeed, a wholesale reconsideration of the moral status that people claim for their resource holdings. If justice requires redistribution of resources or power, the demand is not that you give to others more of what you are morally entitled to keep for yourself (as it would seem in Singer's theory), but to surrender what you are not, in fact, entitled to retain under the circumstances. So even when (global) justice may be served by resource transfer, the point of such transfers is not exhausted by the humanitarian aim of improving the well-being of the worst-off; its further aim might be protection against certain forms of domination or securing fair terms of association. For example, it is sometimes argued that just distribution requires that no one or no group has so much resources or power that they can dominate or subjugate others. Or that none has so little that virtually all control over the most basic requirements of human life is forfeited.
Moreover, duties of humanitarian assistance may be more modest in the targeted level of well-being it requires than duties of justice. Duties of justice arguably aim for a secure level of well-being sufficient for a decent human life. Duties of humanitarian assistance may be better viewed as intended to secure only the basics of survival. Of course, some theories of human rights are very modest in what it counts of the minimum level of well-being to which all persons can rightfully expect under social arrangements. And so while it remains an open question just how high the level of well-being should be as a matter of justice, as well as the richness of the list of elements that must be secured, it is at least plausible to suppose that both the minimum level and minimum content of the list is more ambitious for a theory of justice than it is for a theory of humanitarian assistance.
The above suggestion gains plausibility when we think about the point of humanitarian assistance in contrast to the point of social justice. Duties of humanitarian assistance may be conceived as arising episodically with fulfillment having a clearly defined cut-off point (Rawls's phrase). Natural disasters, famines, and the like are paradigm examples. The connotation is that long-term assistance is not the moral expectation, even if as a matter of fact, severe need is locally entrenched and effective change is seemingly intractable. Justice might then seem more appropriate as a concern with the conditions under which well-being is realized securely over a longer time horizon and not simply focused on strategies for meeting acute need.
Moreover, most statists (those who deny the existence of any cross-border duties of distributive justice) are not entirely clear about what is contemplated in terms of the criterion of fulfillment when they speak of duties of humanity, as opposed to justice. For example, Michael Blake argues for humanitarian duties beyond borders, but the duties he contemplates are ones that have as endpoints a level of well-being for all sufficient for autonomous lives. The time horizon for fulfillment could be quite lengthy, and the practical requirements might entail some substantial alteration in structural arrangements. In terms of demandingness, Blake's account resembles the claims of many human rights theorists who argue that some minimum level of provision is a matter of universal human right grounded in the requirements of human agency (e.g., James Griffin's personhood account).
Thus, it seems that while both duties of humanity and duties of justice may overlap, both in underlying rationales and in their focus on well-being, there is a family of differences between the two that can be useful in drawing some serviceable practical distinctions. We have no definitive resolution. Disagreement persists. But we can see family resemblances among useful, illuminating, provocative ideas about what makes justice a special category of morality. Any or all might well be invoked in particular contexts as a way of aiding our moral diagnosis of situations or decision options. For me, it's not obvious that we need a single account of what makes a social problem one that raises questions of justice when the several accounts we have in play point to some features that any rich account of justice should have in view.
We can summarize these debates in tandem with the discussions above of justice as a matter of rights-claims with a few overarching points about the diversity of ways justice might be seen as normatively distinct from other moral notions.
- Justice seems closely tied to a focal concern with the conditions under which well-being is realized securely over a longer time horizon, and not focused so much on strategies for meeting acute need.
- Justice serves a variety of ultimate aims, such as securing certain valuable forms of relationship and preventing subordination or entrenchment of deep disadvantage.
- Justice sometimes requires us to rethink the moral legitimacy of current resource holdings and power relationships.
- Justice represents the recipient’s point of view; it involves a claim against others that in some cases, warrants coercive means such as state action for its enforcement.
- Claims of justice are the moral demands of the aggrieved against persons and institutions, not merely the requirements that morally conscientious persons appropriately view as binding on themselves.
- And its duties, when fully discharged, are not matters meriting gratitude from the recipient. [For example, a sign that says “thank you for not smoking” is a euphemism from the point of view of public health justice.]
Varieties of Egalitarianism and their Core Disagreements with Libertarianism
Wikimedia symbol for Egalitarianism
What are the core commitments of egalitarian theories of justice, and how do they differ from their libertarian critics? Martin O’Neill and Thad Williamson in a recent book review claim the following.
“There are many ways to look at [egalitarian] social justice, but it is generally understood as demanding that institutions and social practices promote the flourishing of each and all and prevent the domination of any one group by another.”
Egalitarians disagree among themselves about what counts as a minimally acceptable level of well-being. And they disagree about the nature and degree of disadvantage in the design of social arrangements that is morally tolerable or the most problematic.
My colleague Ruth Faden and I defend a particular view in what we call the twin aims of justice.
Ruth and I take our account of well-being to set a fairly high minimum standard and our account of minimal requirements of fairness as rather modest, compared to ideal theories that spell out requirements of equality of opportunity. But the egalitarian permutations are endless.
But egalitarians of all stripes are united in the conclusion that reliance on a scheme of voluntary transactions within unregulated markets is not an adequate institutional basis for realizing the requirements of social justice. For such a scheme is compatible with the production of extremely low levels of well-being for some and highly unfair forms of disadvantaging social interaction.
Put another way, egalitarians are united in their opposition to various key claims made by libertarians. We could discuss a wider range of contrasts among types of justice theories, for example egalitarian or communitarian alternatives. But I focus on the distinction between egalitarians, broadly defined, and libertarians because of the concrete ways in which they are reflected in many current global policy choices.
There is perhaps no canonical definition of egalitarianism. In its narrowest sense, egalitarians seek an answer to the question, Equality of What? Justice, on this narrow view, is said to be a matter of distributive equality; we merely disagree on the correct currency of justice or that which is subject to a demand for equalization.
But there are many theories that wear the egalitarian mantle but construe the label more broadly. John Rawls, for example, counts his own view as broadly egalitarian insofar as it assumes that certain kinds of inequalities must meet a high justificatory burden, not because justice necessarily must be about equality of any one thing. I prefer this broader definition of egalitarianism, and I think that an examination of three prominent strands shows how each stands in direct opposition to one or more of the libertarianism’s core claims.
While much of the philosophical literature is devoted to articulating the differences among broadly egalitarian theories, my aim here is to emphasize their commonalities, especially in opposition to libertarianism. The three strands are the ones already introduced by way of their respective slogans:
Let’s start with contemporary human rights theories. Libertarians defend an austere account of human rights, which includes only negative rights. Negative rights are rights not to be harmed in certain ways or not to have personal and civil liberties or property rights interfered with. For the libertarian, there are no positive rights, or social and economic rights of the sort found in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Broadly egalitarian human rights theories, by contrast, include rights to a decent standard of living, food, a basic level of education, public health measures, a minimum level of health care, and so on.
The point of human rights theory is often expressed as the moral minimum that is required by justice, a morality of the depths, a hedge against outcomes so bad that they are incompatible with any reasonable notion of a decent human life. But egalitarian human rights theories also emphasize the importance of certain forms of fairness in political, legal, social, and economic arenas. The Declaration, for example, includes not only the usual rights of criminal due process, but social rights of women in marriage and divorce, rights of women as full participants in political processes, rights of all to equal pay for equal work, rights of non-discrimination based on religion, and other protections against domination and subordination.
A second strand of egalitarianism is found in contemporary theories of social justice, such as John Rawls’s well-known theory of distributive justice. He takes social justice to be a matter of identifying a set of distributive principles that all parties to a society’s main institutional and social arrangements would endorse as fair terms of social cooperation. His is a model that he calls “justice as fairness.” It includes societal principles that regulate the distribution of “primary social goods,” including basic political and civil liberties, opportunities for jobs and positions of social authority, and all-purpose goods such as income and wealth. While strict equality is required only for the basic liberties, Rawls’s principles limit the range of permissible disadvantage in social and economic opportunity, and they underwrite economic safety nets.
Libertarians, such as Friedrich Hayek, as we have seen already, dismiss the very idea of social justice – the idea that a society or set of social arrangements is properly subject to assessment as just or unjust on the basis of the pattern of distributive inequality that results. Robert Nozick explains the libertarian’s complaint as follows. As long as there is no coercion or fraud in individual economic transactions, then whatever distributive pattern emerges is just, or at least not unjust.
Libertarians even reject any demand for limiting inequalities of opportunity. Cumulative disadvantaging effects are not objectionable. Even vast inequality of bargaining position, or contracts that some would label as exploitative, or agreements secured under terms of extreme economic necessity, are not counted as matters of injustice.
A third strand of egalitarianism is known as relational egalitarianism. Theories of this sort contend that the central focus on distributive justice is misplaced. More fundamental, they argue, are status inequalities, such as those embodied in forms of oppression, political, economic and cultural domination, or gross disparities in social standing or influence, and asymmetric power of various sorts. For relational egalitarians, the point is that we cannot assess which distributive inequalities matter most apart from their impact on relationships in which affected parties stand toward one another. Their overarching concern is with limiting domination or oppression.
Now, one might think that the libertarian and relational egalitarian might be in good position to find common ground. After all, both are concerned ultimately, it may seem, with individual freedom. But there are crucial differences.
For the libertarian, the relevant ideal of a free person is one whose choices are not subject to coercive interference by other individuals or the state. Freedom is equated with mere non-interference. More "un-interfered-with" choice is by definition more freedom.
But for the relational egalitarian, a free person is someone who is not subject to various forms of domination and control through a variety of means, not limited to specific instances of coercive interference with choice.
Herein lies the main difference. Choices made under the tyranny of economic necessity, within grossly asymmetric power relations, or under conditions in which there are few options other than ones structured by, and for the benefit of, dominant social groups are counted as unjust.
A few summary points can make clear just how austere the libertarian view is in relation to these three strands of egalitarianism.
“There are many ways to look at [egalitarian] social justice, but it is generally understood as demanding that institutions and social practices promote the flourishing of each and all and prevent the domination of any one group by another.”
Egalitarians disagree among themselves about what counts as a minimally acceptable level of well-being. And they disagree about the nature and degree of disadvantage in the design of social arrangements that is morally tolerable or the most problematic.
My colleague Ruth Faden and I defend a particular view in what we call the twin aims of justice.
- First, avoidable deprivations of well-being below what is characteristic of a decent human life within humanly alterable institutional contexts are unjust.
- Second, inequalities among persons are unjust because they are unfair, when they result in densely woven patterns of systematic disadvantage from which escape is possible, but only through heroic hard work, great good fortune, or both.
Ruth and I take our account of well-being to set a fairly high minimum standard and our account of minimal requirements of fairness as rather modest, compared to ideal theories that spell out requirements of equality of opportunity. But the egalitarian permutations are endless.
But egalitarians of all stripes are united in the conclusion that reliance on a scheme of voluntary transactions within unregulated markets is not an adequate institutional basis for realizing the requirements of social justice. For such a scheme is compatible with the production of extremely low levels of well-being for some and highly unfair forms of disadvantaging social interaction.
Put another way, egalitarians are united in their opposition to various key claims made by libertarians. We could discuss a wider range of contrasts among types of justice theories, for example egalitarian or communitarian alternatives. But I focus on the distinction between egalitarians, broadly defined, and libertarians because of the concrete ways in which they are reflected in many current global policy choices.
There is perhaps no canonical definition of egalitarianism. In its narrowest sense, egalitarians seek an answer to the question, Equality of What? Justice, on this narrow view, is said to be a matter of distributive equality; we merely disagree on the correct currency of justice or that which is subject to a demand for equalization.
But there are many theories that wear the egalitarian mantle but construe the label more broadly. John Rawls, for example, counts his own view as broadly egalitarian insofar as it assumes that certain kinds of inequalities must meet a high justificatory burden, not because justice necessarily must be about equality of any one thing. I prefer this broader definition of egalitarianism, and I think that an examination of three prominent strands shows how each stands in direct opposition to one or more of the libertarianism’s core claims.
While much of the philosophical literature is devoted to articulating the differences among broadly egalitarian theories, my aim here is to emphasize their commonalities, especially in opposition to libertarianism. The three strands are the ones already introduced by way of their respective slogans:
- Human Rights Theory: Justice is about basic rights or entitlements.
- Distributive Theories of Social Justice: Justice involves principles of fair distribution of benefits and burdens.
- Relational Egalitarianism: Justice is concerned with equality within relationships such that none is dominated by others.
Let’s start with contemporary human rights theories. Libertarians defend an austere account of human rights, which includes only negative rights. Negative rights are rights not to be harmed in certain ways or not to have personal and civil liberties or property rights interfered with. For the libertarian, there are no positive rights, or social and economic rights of the sort found in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Broadly egalitarian human rights theories, by contrast, include rights to a decent standard of living, food, a basic level of education, public health measures, a minimum level of health care, and so on.
The point of human rights theory is often expressed as the moral minimum that is required by justice, a morality of the depths, a hedge against outcomes so bad that they are incompatible with any reasonable notion of a decent human life. But egalitarian human rights theories also emphasize the importance of certain forms of fairness in political, legal, social, and economic arenas. The Declaration, for example, includes not only the usual rights of criminal due process, but social rights of women in marriage and divorce, rights of women as full participants in political processes, rights of all to equal pay for equal work, rights of non-discrimination based on religion, and other protections against domination and subordination.
A second strand of egalitarianism is found in contemporary theories of social justice, such as John Rawls’s well-known theory of distributive justice. He takes social justice to be a matter of identifying a set of distributive principles that all parties to a society’s main institutional and social arrangements would endorse as fair terms of social cooperation. His is a model that he calls “justice as fairness.” It includes societal principles that regulate the distribution of “primary social goods,” including basic political and civil liberties, opportunities for jobs and positions of social authority, and all-purpose goods such as income and wealth. While strict equality is required only for the basic liberties, Rawls’s principles limit the range of permissible disadvantage in social and economic opportunity, and they underwrite economic safety nets.
Libertarians, such as Friedrich Hayek, as we have seen already, dismiss the very idea of social justice – the idea that a society or set of social arrangements is properly subject to assessment as just or unjust on the basis of the pattern of distributive inequality that results. Robert Nozick explains the libertarian’s complaint as follows. As long as there is no coercion or fraud in individual economic transactions, then whatever distributive pattern emerges is just, or at least not unjust.
Libertarians even reject any demand for limiting inequalities of opportunity. Cumulative disadvantaging effects are not objectionable. Even vast inequality of bargaining position, or contracts that some would label as exploitative, or agreements secured under terms of extreme economic necessity, are not counted as matters of injustice.
A third strand of egalitarianism is known as relational egalitarianism. Theories of this sort contend that the central focus on distributive justice is misplaced. More fundamental, they argue, are status inequalities, such as those embodied in forms of oppression, political, economic and cultural domination, or gross disparities in social standing or influence, and asymmetric power of various sorts. For relational egalitarians, the point is that we cannot assess which distributive inequalities matter most apart from their impact on relationships in which affected parties stand toward one another. Their overarching concern is with limiting domination or oppression.
Now, one might think that the libertarian and relational egalitarian might be in good position to find common ground. After all, both are concerned ultimately, it may seem, with individual freedom. But there are crucial differences.
For the libertarian, the relevant ideal of a free person is one whose choices are not subject to coercive interference by other individuals or the state. Freedom is equated with mere non-interference. More "un-interfered-with" choice is by definition more freedom.
But for the relational egalitarian, a free person is someone who is not subject to various forms of domination and control through a variety of means, not limited to specific instances of coercive interference with choice.
Herein lies the main difference. Choices made under the tyranny of economic necessity, within grossly asymmetric power relations, or under conditions in which there are few options other than ones structured by, and for the benefit of, dominant social groups are counted as unjust.
A few summary points can make clear just how austere the libertarian view is in relation to these three strands of egalitarianism.
- For libertarians, neither distributive inequalities nor status inequalities are matters of injustice.
- No outcome, no matter how bad or how far below a standard of a decent human life some might fall, is unjust unless brought about by unfair transactions among individuals, and the only transactions that are unfair are ones involving coercion or fraud.
- Voluntary market transactions are the paradigm of libertarian justice.
The Prospects for Reconciliation? Rawls and Classical Liberalism, but without the Libertarian Core
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Tomasi's book is presented as a type of classical liberal theory of justice, but not as a libertarian variant of the sort exemplified in the well-known works of Robert Nozick, Eric Mark, Jan Narveson, or Loren Lomasky (p. 53). The book diverges from that familiar path insofar as it is animated by the commitment to the moral importance of economic liberties endorsed by libertarians and other classical liberals but animated equally by an attraction to core commitments of egalitarian and Rawlsian theories of social justice, which virtually all other classical liberals reject.
It departs from libertarianism in two very substantial ways. First, it rejects the libertarian's usual justificatory approach in favor of the "deliberative" justificatory strategy often relied upon by egalitarians, including most famously, Rawls's hypothetical social contract. Second, it rejects the libertarian's out-of-hand dismissal of an evaluative standard by which the totality of social arrangements and the cumulative effects of economic transactions pursuant to the rules of those arrangements may be assessed.
Tomasi's "market democracy" theory of social justice is offered as an interpretation of Rawls's own theory of "justice as fairness" but it diverges from what he calls the more familiar "social democracy" interpretation favored by the "high liberal" tradition (Samuel Freedom's label) in two major ways. First, he argues for a different set of institutional arrangements as a superior way to realize Rawlsian principles of justice than standardly offered by egalitarian social democrats. Second, he offers a different interpretation of the Rawlsian principles than Rawls himself defends, but in so doing he argues that the market democracy account is a morally improved interpretation, one more faithful to the deepest commitments of the Rawlsian or other deliberative justificatory approaches.
Let's start with the differences at the level of justification. Most libertarians arrive at their conclusions regarding the requirements of justice via a foundational idea of individuals having an absolute moral right of self-ownership (p. 49). Because the individual is inviolable, a variety of liberty-limiting social policies are ruled out. Taxes for the sake of economic redistribution, for example, are ruled out, as are state interferences with voluntary labor contracts, as are legal doctrines such as eminent domain and environmental use regulations that erode robust property rights. For such policies are said to mean an abandonment of proper recognition of the status of each person as an inviolable self-author who possesses undiminished property rights in herself and her labors.
The commitment to self-ownership, then, underwrites absolute rights of economic liberty, such as rights of holding and using property, or sale, transfer, or donation of one's own labor ((pp. 23ff). Whereas classical liberalism tends to view the outcome of free market exchange as "largely definitive of justice" (p. 22) because their rationale is that such social arrangements will be beneficial to all in the long run, libertarians, because of their foundational commitments, see those rights as absolute and thus the associated outcomes are "entirely definitive of justice." (p. 47; cf 124).
Egalitarian liberals in the Rawlsian vein take a different approach the problem of justification of principles of justice and the institutional arrangements they regulate (p. 54). The deliberative approach, more or less in the mode of hypothetical social contract arguments, such as Rawls's well-known "original position" proceed from a conception of the person, which Tomasi endorses (pp. 74, 88, 103) and He uses it to justify conclusions of the sort that market democracy theories of justice defend (p. 90). Tomasi endorses a variant of Rawls's conception of a person as a free and equal citizen who possesses and wishes to develop and exercise two "moral powers." For Rawls, these two powers include the capacity to develop and act upon a self-created life plan, and the capacity for an effective sense of justice, understood as a reciprocal commitment to the recognition and support of the same capacities of fellow citizens who wish to develop and exercise their own capacities for self-authorship. In short, the deepest commitment of the deliberative model is to the creation of a social world in which the two moral powers of citizens might be developed (p. 40).
Justification, then, is a matter of identifying principles of justice that can be justified to all (reasonable) members of a cooperative society who are supposed to endorse this model of the two powers of moral agents, which in Tomasi's characterization, are described as capacities for responsible self-authorship and capacities to see fellow citizens as responsible self-authors too (pp. 77, 88).
Now, the deliberative model, based upon the ideal of free and equal citizens, takes us well into normative territory that the libertarian dares not go. Tomasi ends up following Rawls in defending both a robust set of political and civil liberties (that libertarians applaud) and social arrangements that secure sufficient material basis for the development and exercise of these two moral powers (which libertarians reject) (p. 43). What results is what Tomasi calls a principled basis for economic safety nets (p. 98), described also as "a threshold below which no class of citizens should fall" (p. 94).
But the very same rationale that underwrites both extensive civil and political liberties and economic safety nets, in Tomasi's hands, also underwrites a significant range of economic liberties that should be "constitutionally entrenched along with the civil and political liberties" (p. 91). Thus, Tomasi uses the Rawlsian idea of the importance of the development of one's capacities for self-authorship as a way of defending economic liberties, but it differs from the libertarian who predicates these liberties on absolute rights of self-ownership, the entrenched liberties are viewed as weighty but not absolute (pp. 20, 100). This too, of course, diverges from Rawls not only in inclusion of economic rights (see Rawls, A Theory of Justice, revised edition, 1999, p. 54; and Political Liberalism, p. 298) as part of his first principle of justice (the principle of equal liberties), but in according one of the rights less than the full lexical, or absolute priority over the other two distributive elements of this theory.
What then is the more specific argument meant to justify this inclusion? Here Tomasi invokes an argument from J.S. Mill (widely assumed to have been influential in Rawls's own thinking). Mill's account of protected liberties is said to rest on a perfectionist ideal of the person as someone whose highest order interests lie in the full development of higher capacities for reasoning, forming intimate attachments to others, and refining moral sensibilities (pp. 29-30). This perfectionist reading of Mill is by now fairly common, at least among people not stuck in an earlier generation of Mill scholarship. But unlike Mill or Rawls, Tomasi deploys the form of argument to defend the importance of economic liberties to self-development as a moral agent. The language of his conclusion is quite strong. Freedom to choose an occupation, to sell, trade or donate one's labor is essential to self-development and self-respect (a central value Rawls also appeals to) (pp. 77-84, 93). Personal exercise of economic liberties is a necessary condition for development of the two moral powers (p. 251). Failure to include economic liberties into the class of protected liberties is a "defect from the moral point of view" (p. 105). For an extended critique of this line of argument, see Martin O’Neill and Thad Williamson in a recent book review.
But the bigger picture is that Tomasi has defended a modified interpretation of Rawls's set of principles using the mode of deliberative justification that prescinds from an agreed-upon ideal conception of the person that Rawls endorses. In effect, Tomasi exploits an opening that Rawls himself creates (p. 38). In Justice as Fairness (pp. 133-35), Rawls concedes that his own social contract method could generate a range of alternative conceptions of justice. The staunchest critics worry that we should have graver doubts as to whether any clear advice on choice of principles can be gleaned from premises regarding a moral conception of the person and the form of interpersonal justification within which it figures. Tomasi takes up the challenge, but only as a revisionist, rather than as a skeptic.
Tomasi even defends Rawls's other two distributive principles, the Fair Equality of Opportunity Principle and the Difference Principle, but with some revisions in each of these as well. For example, Tomasi defends the strongest version of the Difference Principle, the one that asserts that the distributive share due to the members of the least well-off class should be maximized. But Tomasi motivates his own account by way of worries that there is some uncertainty or ambiguity in Rawls's own formulation of the proper "distribuendum" of that principle. For Tomasi, the clearly correct answer is the personal wealth over which the least well-off exercises control (pp. 177-178, 229-32, 266). That conclusion fits well, of course, with the underlying idea that principles of justice should serve the overarching goal of self-development and secure the social bases of self-respect (pp. 171, 185), at least under certain empirical assumptions. Empirical assumptions turn out to matter quite a lot.
Here, then, is where Tomasi exploits a second opening in Rawls overall theoretical enterprise. He notes, correctly I think, that we might view the deliberative justification process as involving two tasks. The first task is the identification of a "set of principles of justice that expresses our commitment to treat citizens as free and equal self-governing agents" (p. 206). The secondary task is to identify regime types or the kinds of institutional arrangements that realize those commitments. He notes that it is an open question which interpretation of of the basic principles - and the institutions that realize them - best satisfy our commitment to treating people as free and equal self-governing moral agents (p. 228). Tomasi spends a bit of time musing over just how much "ideal theory" of the sort Rawls and others can deliver without concrete reference to the way institutions work [after all, how else might we judge what sort of principle and arrangements work are mutually advantageous? (p. 208)]. Nonetheless, Tomasi stays within the contours set by the two-stage identification test, and he notes that even at the level of ideal theory so much of the weight of argument depends on empirical assumptions. For example, he notes (p. 234) that Rawls's defense of the Difference Principle, even in the abstract, appeals to certain familiar economic assumptions about the role of incentive structures built into wage differentials in increasing the benefits to the least well-off.
But how are we to determine what is relevant or decisive in evaluating whether some institutional arrangements best realize the principles? It's here that Rawls is very sketchy. So much so that Tomasi renders the following (plausible) verdict: " A candidate regime type that aims to realize justice as fairness fails to realize justice as fairness only if it pursues a strategy that clearly violates some widely recognized law of economics or political sociology" (p. 233). The point is put quite strongly, and Rawls might even view the underdetermination of institutional structure by first principles as something of a theoretical virtue. After all, Rawls expresses a desire to remain uncommitted in the choice between property owning democracies and certain forms of democratic socialism.
But the open-endedness comes at a price, which Tomasi seizes upon to the advantage of his market democratic interpretation. Why not plump for a variety of market-based means to realization of first principles? (see especially, pp. 242-253). Neither Rawls nor any other egalitarian theorist of social justice can rule out his suggestions without appeal to empirical matters, such as the way markets work. The world of ideal theory suddenly descends into the realm of fact-driven inquiry regarding consequences of alternative feasible social arrangements.
Whatever else one thinks about Tomasi's other arguments - the contribution of economic liberty to self-development, the theoretical viability of the justificatory model he has adopted and adapted - the book ends on a very serious challenge to the way much political philosophical argument has been conducted since the publication of Rawls's A Theory of Justice. The challenge, however, can be read in more than one way.
Tomasi wants to go deep into social democratic liberal territory by adopting their model of justification, which his arguments show to be less conclusive than standard liberal theorist suppose. While Tomasi wants exploit that justificatory gap, along with the heavy empirical dependence that even Rawls's principles rest upon, to make way for his own alternative. But equally plausible is the prospect that what is exposed are the theoretical weaknesses that undermine both social democratic and market democratic interpretations. Perhaps it is the method of justification itself, rather than particular interpretative results that should be reconsidered. If so, Tomasi has done more to set back the case for the standard interpretation than advance the case for his own alternative interpretation. Maybe we should be more suspicious of the justificatory method itself, as well as more attuned to actual empirical details in theorizing about the requirements of justice even under shared assumptions about human beings.
It departs from libertarianism in two very substantial ways. First, it rejects the libertarian's usual justificatory approach in favor of the "deliberative" justificatory strategy often relied upon by egalitarians, including most famously, Rawls's hypothetical social contract. Second, it rejects the libertarian's out-of-hand dismissal of an evaluative standard by which the totality of social arrangements and the cumulative effects of economic transactions pursuant to the rules of those arrangements may be assessed.
Tomasi's "market democracy" theory of social justice is offered as an interpretation of Rawls's own theory of "justice as fairness" but it diverges from what he calls the more familiar "social democracy" interpretation favored by the "high liberal" tradition (Samuel Freedom's label) in two major ways. First, he argues for a different set of institutional arrangements as a superior way to realize Rawlsian principles of justice than standardly offered by egalitarian social democrats. Second, he offers a different interpretation of the Rawlsian principles than Rawls himself defends, but in so doing he argues that the market democracy account is a morally improved interpretation, one more faithful to the deepest commitments of the Rawlsian or other deliberative justificatory approaches.
Let's start with the differences at the level of justification. Most libertarians arrive at their conclusions regarding the requirements of justice via a foundational idea of individuals having an absolute moral right of self-ownership (p. 49). Because the individual is inviolable, a variety of liberty-limiting social policies are ruled out. Taxes for the sake of economic redistribution, for example, are ruled out, as are state interferences with voluntary labor contracts, as are legal doctrines such as eminent domain and environmental use regulations that erode robust property rights. For such policies are said to mean an abandonment of proper recognition of the status of each person as an inviolable self-author who possesses undiminished property rights in herself and her labors.
The commitment to self-ownership, then, underwrites absolute rights of economic liberty, such as rights of holding and using property, or sale, transfer, or donation of one's own labor ((pp. 23ff). Whereas classical liberalism tends to view the outcome of free market exchange as "largely definitive of justice" (p. 22) because their rationale is that such social arrangements will be beneficial to all in the long run, libertarians, because of their foundational commitments, see those rights as absolute and thus the associated outcomes are "entirely definitive of justice." (p. 47; cf 124).
Egalitarian liberals in the Rawlsian vein take a different approach the problem of justification of principles of justice and the institutional arrangements they regulate (p. 54). The deliberative approach, more or less in the mode of hypothetical social contract arguments, such as Rawls's well-known "original position" proceed from a conception of the person, which Tomasi endorses (pp. 74, 88, 103) and He uses it to justify conclusions of the sort that market democracy theories of justice defend (p. 90). Tomasi endorses a variant of Rawls's conception of a person as a free and equal citizen who possesses and wishes to develop and exercise two "moral powers." For Rawls, these two powers include the capacity to develop and act upon a self-created life plan, and the capacity for an effective sense of justice, understood as a reciprocal commitment to the recognition and support of the same capacities of fellow citizens who wish to develop and exercise their own capacities for self-authorship. In short, the deepest commitment of the deliberative model is to the creation of a social world in which the two moral powers of citizens might be developed (p. 40).
Justification, then, is a matter of identifying principles of justice that can be justified to all (reasonable) members of a cooperative society who are supposed to endorse this model of the two powers of moral agents, which in Tomasi's characterization, are described as capacities for responsible self-authorship and capacities to see fellow citizens as responsible self-authors too (pp. 77, 88).
Now, the deliberative model, based upon the ideal of free and equal citizens, takes us well into normative territory that the libertarian dares not go. Tomasi ends up following Rawls in defending both a robust set of political and civil liberties (that libertarians applaud) and social arrangements that secure sufficient material basis for the development and exercise of these two moral powers (which libertarians reject) (p. 43). What results is what Tomasi calls a principled basis for economic safety nets (p. 98), described also as "a threshold below which no class of citizens should fall" (p. 94).
But the very same rationale that underwrites both extensive civil and political liberties and economic safety nets, in Tomasi's hands, also underwrites a significant range of economic liberties that should be "constitutionally entrenched along with the civil and political liberties" (p. 91). Thus, Tomasi uses the Rawlsian idea of the importance of the development of one's capacities for self-authorship as a way of defending economic liberties, but it differs from the libertarian who predicates these liberties on absolute rights of self-ownership, the entrenched liberties are viewed as weighty but not absolute (pp. 20, 100). This too, of course, diverges from Rawls not only in inclusion of economic rights (see Rawls, A Theory of Justice, revised edition, 1999, p. 54; and Political Liberalism, p. 298) as part of his first principle of justice (the principle of equal liberties), but in according one of the rights less than the full lexical, or absolute priority over the other two distributive elements of this theory.
What then is the more specific argument meant to justify this inclusion? Here Tomasi invokes an argument from J.S. Mill (widely assumed to have been influential in Rawls's own thinking). Mill's account of protected liberties is said to rest on a perfectionist ideal of the person as someone whose highest order interests lie in the full development of higher capacities for reasoning, forming intimate attachments to others, and refining moral sensibilities (pp. 29-30). This perfectionist reading of Mill is by now fairly common, at least among people not stuck in an earlier generation of Mill scholarship. But unlike Mill or Rawls, Tomasi deploys the form of argument to defend the importance of economic liberties to self-development as a moral agent. The language of his conclusion is quite strong. Freedom to choose an occupation, to sell, trade or donate one's labor is essential to self-development and self-respect (a central value Rawls also appeals to) (pp. 77-84, 93). Personal exercise of economic liberties is a necessary condition for development of the two moral powers (p. 251). Failure to include economic liberties into the class of protected liberties is a "defect from the moral point of view" (p. 105). For an extended critique of this line of argument, see Martin O’Neill and Thad Williamson in a recent book review.
But the bigger picture is that Tomasi has defended a modified interpretation of Rawls's set of principles using the mode of deliberative justification that prescinds from an agreed-upon ideal conception of the person that Rawls endorses. In effect, Tomasi exploits an opening that Rawls himself creates (p. 38). In Justice as Fairness (pp. 133-35), Rawls concedes that his own social contract method could generate a range of alternative conceptions of justice. The staunchest critics worry that we should have graver doubts as to whether any clear advice on choice of principles can be gleaned from premises regarding a moral conception of the person and the form of interpersonal justification within which it figures. Tomasi takes up the challenge, but only as a revisionist, rather than as a skeptic.
Tomasi even defends Rawls's other two distributive principles, the Fair Equality of Opportunity Principle and the Difference Principle, but with some revisions in each of these as well. For example, Tomasi defends the strongest version of the Difference Principle, the one that asserts that the distributive share due to the members of the least well-off class should be maximized. But Tomasi motivates his own account by way of worries that there is some uncertainty or ambiguity in Rawls's own formulation of the proper "distribuendum" of that principle. For Tomasi, the clearly correct answer is the personal wealth over which the least well-off exercises control (pp. 177-178, 229-32, 266). That conclusion fits well, of course, with the underlying idea that principles of justice should serve the overarching goal of self-development and secure the social bases of self-respect (pp. 171, 185), at least under certain empirical assumptions. Empirical assumptions turn out to matter quite a lot.
Here, then, is where Tomasi exploits a second opening in Rawls overall theoretical enterprise. He notes, correctly I think, that we might view the deliberative justification process as involving two tasks. The first task is the identification of a "set of principles of justice that expresses our commitment to treat citizens as free and equal self-governing agents" (p. 206). The secondary task is to identify regime types or the kinds of institutional arrangements that realize those commitments. He notes that it is an open question which interpretation of of the basic principles - and the institutions that realize them - best satisfy our commitment to treating people as free and equal self-governing moral agents (p. 228). Tomasi spends a bit of time musing over just how much "ideal theory" of the sort Rawls and others can deliver without concrete reference to the way institutions work [after all, how else might we judge what sort of principle and arrangements work are mutually advantageous? (p. 208)]. Nonetheless, Tomasi stays within the contours set by the two-stage identification test, and he notes that even at the level of ideal theory so much of the weight of argument depends on empirical assumptions. For example, he notes (p. 234) that Rawls's defense of the Difference Principle, even in the abstract, appeals to certain familiar economic assumptions about the role of incentive structures built into wage differentials in increasing the benefits to the least well-off.
But how are we to determine what is relevant or decisive in evaluating whether some institutional arrangements best realize the principles? It's here that Rawls is very sketchy. So much so that Tomasi renders the following (plausible) verdict: " A candidate regime type that aims to realize justice as fairness fails to realize justice as fairness only if it pursues a strategy that clearly violates some widely recognized law of economics or political sociology" (p. 233). The point is put quite strongly, and Rawls might even view the underdetermination of institutional structure by first principles as something of a theoretical virtue. After all, Rawls expresses a desire to remain uncommitted in the choice between property owning democracies and certain forms of democratic socialism.
But the open-endedness comes at a price, which Tomasi seizes upon to the advantage of his market democratic interpretation. Why not plump for a variety of market-based means to realization of first principles? (see especially, pp. 242-253). Neither Rawls nor any other egalitarian theorist of social justice can rule out his suggestions without appeal to empirical matters, such as the way markets work. The world of ideal theory suddenly descends into the realm of fact-driven inquiry regarding consequences of alternative feasible social arrangements.
Whatever else one thinks about Tomasi's other arguments - the contribution of economic liberty to self-development, the theoretical viability of the justificatory model he has adopted and adapted - the book ends on a very serious challenge to the way much political philosophical argument has been conducted since the publication of Rawls's A Theory of Justice. The challenge, however, can be read in more than one way.
Tomasi wants to go deep into social democratic liberal territory by adopting their model of justification, which his arguments show to be less conclusive than standard liberal theorist suppose. While Tomasi wants exploit that justificatory gap, along with the heavy empirical dependence that even Rawls's principles rest upon, to make way for his own alternative. But equally plausible is the prospect that what is exposed are the theoretical weaknesses that undermine both social democratic and market democratic interpretations. Perhaps it is the method of justification itself, rather than particular interpretative results that should be reconsidered. If so, Tomasi has done more to set back the case for the standard interpretation than advance the case for his own alternative interpretation. Maybe we should be more suspicious of the justificatory method itself, as well as more attuned to actual empirical details in theorizing about the requirements of justice even under shared assumptions about human beings.