A Theory of Justice

“What is justice?”

• The Code of Hammurabi (Babylon, 18th c. BCE)• Judaism, Christianity, Islam: scales (balance,

regulation, harmony), measured judgment (rewards / punishment), placing something in its rightful place, lex talionis (an eye for an eye / law of retaliation)

• Greek mythology: Dike, harmonic mean, with arithmetic mean (peace) and geometric mean (fair order) make up the cosmic law (Themis)

• People are to receive what they are due

To render to each person her due

• What do we actually owe to each other?• Equality in the law or equality before the law?• Is the legal conception of justice self-sufficient? • Religious, moral, political grounds• Properly philosophical sense of justice: suspend

any religious or cosmological approach to this problem and focus on the specifically political conception of justice, so as to better articulate it with its correlated moral and legal dimensions

John Rawls (1921-2002)

• A Theory of Justice, Harvard U Press, 1971.• Political Liberalism, Columbia U Press, 1993.• The Law of Peoples, Harvard U Press, 1999.

Rawls, A Theory of JusticeAn ethical-political conception

• “Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought.”

• “A conception of justice which generalizes and carries to a higher level of abstraction the familiar theory of the social contract in Locke, Rousseau, and Kant.”

• Contractarianism: state of nature → civil society• “Distributive justice ...the role of its principles in

assigning rights and duties.”

“Justice as Fairness”

• Political Obligation• Social Contract• Distributive Justice• Deontological Argument vs. Utilitarianism• Procedural vs. Substantive Virtue Ethics• Rules and rights chosen by fair procedures

are themselves fair, as they take into account our moral nature as equal, free persons

“Justice of Fairness”: An ethical-political theory

Ideal theory ↔ Nonideal theory OP – WOS ↔ “we” (concrete, real citizens)

Original position: parties from behind a veil of ignorance choose the principles of justice to distribute the social primary goods for a well-ordered society, in which public criteria for judging the feasible, basic structure of society would be publicly recognized and accepted by all. (thought-experiment)

Reflective equilibrium: OP – WOS – “WE”Primacy of Right over Goods ( Thick / Thin )

TJ: Principles of Justice

• First: Each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive scheme of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar scheme of liberties for others. (Equal Liberty Principle)

• Second: Social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that : a) they are to be of the greatest benefit to the least-advantaged members of society (Difference Principle); b) offices and positions must be open to everyone under conditions of Fair Equality of Opportunity.

Maximin = maximum minimorum choice produces highest payoff for the worst outcome

• Property-owning democracy vs. Welfare state• Society: fair system of social cooperation

among free, equal citizens from one generation to the other

• All social primary goods (liberty and opportunity, income and wealth, and the bases of self-respect) are to be distributed equally unless an unequal distribution of any of these goods is to the advantage of the less favored.

Procedural Devices of Representation

• TJ § 40 : Kantian “noumenal selves”• OP : Free and equal persons with two moral powers

(sense of justice and conception of the good)• WOS : Primacy of the right over the good• Reflective Equilibrium: coherence method in which a

set of beliefs is arrived at by a process of deliberative mutual adjustment among particular moral judgments (“we”), general principles & theoretical constructions

• PL – TJ : “WE” – WOS – OP /overlapping consensus

Rawls’s "Kantian interpretation"A Theory of Justice (§ 40) can be ultimately

reconciled with his later writings (esp. Dewey Lectures and Political Liberalism) : conception of political constructivism.

Rawls revisits, reviews, and recasts his coherentist conception of justice as fairness so as to turn political constructivism into the groundwork of a political liberalism that distances itself from a moral constructivism (comprehensive doctrine) just as TJ did in relation to moral realism and intuitionism.

TJ - PLEven as one starts from the fact of political

pluralism --in PL, as opposed to the original position in TJ-- within a given public political culture, one still resorts to a contractarian device of representation on the level of reasonable, intersubjectively shared values and norms without hastily identifying the latter with the main source of morality or asserting the primacy of particularized traditions over universalizable normativity – communitarian critique (e.g. Sandel’s) of “unencumbered self”

J. Rawls, The Law of Peoples

• OP – Society of Peoples – “Realistic Utopia”• Foreign Policy for Liberal, Democratic Peoples• “Peoples (as organized by their government) are free and

independent, and their freedom and independence is to be respected by other peoples.”

• “Peoples have the right of self-defense but no right to war.”

• “Peoples are to observe a duty of non-intervention.”

• “Peoples are to honor human rights.”