A Conceptual Investigation of Justice

Kyle Johannsen

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351736336
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Ideologies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Conceptual analysis has fallen out of favor in political philosophy. The influence of figures like John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin has led political philosophy to focus on questions about what should be done, and to ignore questions about the usage of words.

In this book, Kyle Johannsen calls for renewed attention to the manner in which the word 'justice' is and should be used. Focusing on the late work of G.A. Cohen, Johannsen argues that debates over both the content and scope of egalitarian justice are, to a large extent, really just conceptual. Whereas some philosophers have been using the term 'justice' to refer to one among a plurality of values, others have been using it to refer to institutional rightness. Though the latter use of 'justice' is presently more dominant, he argues that much is to be gained from thinking of justice as one value among many. Doing so sheds light on the nature of both democracy and legitimacy, and, paradoxically, makes better sense of the idea that justice is 'the first virtue of institutions'.

1
Introduction

In contemporary debates about justice, political philosophers take themselves to be engaged with a subject related to but distinct from moral rightness. Though they acknowledge that justice is a normative topic, its subject matter is generally thought to be narrower than the general nature of right and wrong. This distinction has its origins in ancient philosophy. In The Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle begins his discussion of justice by distinguishing between two different but related senses of the term: a narrow sense of the word ‘justice’ that refers to a part of morality, specifically the part pertaining to fairness, and which bears on matters of distribution and rectification; and a broader sense of the word ‘justice’ that refers to moral rightness in general.¹ My book argues that a disagreement over the sense in which justice is narrower than moral rightness implicitly lies at the heart of much debate between contemporary egalitarians. On one side of the disagreement is a view shared by many contemporary liberals, most notably John Rawls, which understands narrowness in terms of context specificity. In their view, justice is specifically about the moral rightness of institutions. Put another way, they think of it as the output of practical reasoning about how institutions ought to be designed.² By contrast, many value pluralists, most notably Isaiah Berlin, understand justice’s narrowness as singularity against a plural background. In their view, justice is one fundamental value among a plurality of fundamental values.³ When justice is understood as one fundamental value among many, to say that something is a requirement of justice is not to say that it is required, all things considered, as the demands of justice are often not entirely feasible and must sometimes give way to the demands of competing values. Thinking of justice this way means thinking of it as an input in practical reasoning, rather than the output of it.⁴ Though Berlin is probably the most prominent twentieth-century philosopher to propound the pluralist view, the most systematic and rigorous articulation of it can be found in the later work of G. A. Cohen, especially in his recent book, Rescuing Justice and Equality.⁵ For this reason I often focus on Cohen’s work especially.

My book has two main purposes. The first is to establish that the disagreement between pluralist and contextualist understandings of narrowness is theoretically significant, and the second is to establish that the pluralist understanding is the correct one. With respect to the first purpose, I’ll argue that much depends on whether one understands justice in the pluralist manner or in the contextualist manner. In particular, I’ll connect the question of narrowness to two prominent debates in contemporary political philosophy: the debate over the luck egalitarian theory of distributive justice, and the debate over whether distributive justice imposes requirements on the choices citizens make in their personal lives. In my view, the correct answer in each of these debates depends on how justice’s narrowness should be understood.

Much contemporary debate over the content of distributive justice revolves around the theory Elizabeth Anderson dubbed ‘luck egalitarianism.’⁶ Luck egalitarianism, broadly speaking, is the view that inequalities traceable to choice are just, while those traceable to a person’s circumstances are not. Its proponents maintain that justice supports compensating a less well-off individual insofar as her disadvantaged status is no fault of her own.⁷ Since its inception in the 1980s, luck egalitarianism’s coherence with certain core intuitive judgments long made it the dominant egalitarian alternative to John Rawls’s theory of justice. On the one hand, the idea that inequalities traceable to circumstance are unjust explains why it seems unfair for one’s endowment of natural talents or for the socio-economic class into which one is born to determine one’s life prospects. It also explains what seems unfair about disabilities attributable to sheer misfortune. On the other hand, the idea that inequalities traceable to choice are just explains why it seems fair for those who gamble away their holdings or choose leisure over work to have less than others.⁸ In recent years, however, critics of luck egalitarianism have argued that it suffers from a number of serious deficiencies. They claim, for example, that it makes extravagant metaphysical assumptions about the nature of free will,⁹ expresses a disrespectful attitude towards those it would seek to assist,¹⁰ and has counterintuitive implications.¹¹ What’s more, critics argue that luck egalitarians misunderstand the relationship between distributive justice and the justice of a society. They maintain that egalitarian social relations are what constitute a just society, and that distributive justice is only valuable insofar as it instrumentally contributes to the realization of social equality. In their view, any plausible account of the content of distributive justice must be justified in light of its instrumental relationship with social equality.¹²

A second dispute also rages among contemporary egalitarians, this time concerning the scope of distributive justice. The central question is whether the principles of justice applicable to institutional structures are also applicable to the personal choices citizens make within those structures. According to John Rawls, for example, a society’s institutions should be designed to benefit its worst-off citizens, but better-off citizens are not required to attend to worse-off citizens when making choices about employment, how to treat family members, and so on.¹³ However, critics argue that a truly just society requires more than institutional justice. It requires a social ethos that motivates citizens to act upon principles of justice in their daily lives.¹⁴ They note, among other things, that the choices which constitute informal institutions, such as the family, have a profound impact on the distribution of life prospects (just think of how unequal the distribution of benefits and burdens is within the households of certain families and the effect this has on those born into them).¹⁵ In reply, supporters of the Rawlsian view have argued that requiring citizens to devote their everyday lives to benefitting the worst off is too demanding.¹⁶

In this book, I argue that proper attention to an implicit disagreement over justice’s narrowness sheds light on both the dispute over luck egalitarianism and the dispute over whether institutional justice extends to the realm of personal choice. For both disputes, I claim that the correct answer depends on what one means by the term ‘justice.’ On the one hand, I argue that if we understand justice’s narrowness in the manner Cohen and other pluralists do, that is, a conception of justice to be a conception of one fundamental value among many, then luck egalitarianism is a compelling theory. What’s more, I argue that identifying justice as one fundamental value among many entails its application to the context of personal choice. On the other hand, I argue that if we understand justice’s narrowness in a contextual manner, that is, understand justice to be the part of morality that pertains to how we ought to design a society’s institutions, all things considered, then luck egalitarianism proves inadequate. What’s more, if justice is composed of all-things-considered principles adopted for the institutional context, then it proves implausible to claim that those principles are also suitable for the personal context. If I am right about the significance of the disagreement over narrowness, then a considerable amount of dispute among contemporary egalitarians is really just conceptual. Since disputants are either unaware that they are using the term ‘justice’ differently, or, as with Cohen, are generally aware of it but inadvertently equivocate when responding to critics,¹⁷ the result is that they frequently talk past each other. What’s actually a disagreement over the conceptual identity of justice ends up manifesting as a dispute over content and scope.

Establishing that the disputes over content and scope are traceable to different uses of the term ‘justice’ does not by itself establish a philosophical issue, however. After all, there are many words in the English language that have multiple meanings. Though this sometimes makes it necessary to disambiguate how a term is being used, there’s nothing wrong with sometimes using the word one way and sometimes using it another way, and thus nothing wrong with claiming that each use is correct. To dispel the worry that there’s no philosophical issue at stake between egalitarian disputants, I argue that the disagreement between pluralists and contextualists is more than a disagreement over the sense in which justice is a part of morality. Were this the only difference between them, then it would be easy to conclude that pluralists are talking about narrow justice (fairness) and contextualists are interested in what broad justice (moral rightness) has to say about politics. In other words, it would be easy to conclude that the difference between these camps is strictly verbal. Against the ‘merely verbal’ interpretation, I argue that different uses of the term ‘justice’ reflect a theoretical disagreement. They reflect a disagreement over the manner in which fairness should be understood. On the one hand, proponents of the pluralist view think of fairness as a substantive value that must be traded off against other values when justifying action-guiding principles. In their view, substantive fairness simply is narrow justice and plausible action-guiding principles necessarily fall somewhat short of it, since they must reflect other values, too (see endnote18 for some qualifying remarks).¹⁸ Proponents of the contextualist view, on the other hand, think of fairness as a procedural concept. Since the weights we assign different values are a matter about which there is reasonable disagreement, assigning weights in a fair manner ostensibly requires a kind of fairness that is not itself a value to be weighed. What is needed is a procedural concept that can justify the adopted set of weights, and the action-guiding principles that reflect those weights, to those who will be subject to the state’s coercive force.¹⁹ When fairness is understood this way, action-guiding principles are fully fair, so long as they are adopted through a fair procedure.²⁰ Understanding fairness procedurally, instead of substantively, therefore makes it conceptually plausible to identify narrow justice with our action-guiding institutional principles.

In response to the contextualist position, I argue that although procedural fairness is important, substantive fairness cannot be eliminated. Non-arbitrarily specifying the content of procedural fairness, whether it is the sort of procedural fairness at play in contractualist theories of justice or the sort of fairness at play in democratic procedures, requires a substantive criterion of fairness. If I am right, then narrow justice, understood in the manner pluralists do, is integral to procedural fairness and, therefore, to the legitimate use of coercion as well.

By identifying the real issue at stake in egalitarian debates over distributive justice’s content and scope, this book promises to help us better understand contemporary disagreement between egalitarians. It also promises to shed light on where focusing our theoretical efforts is most likely to secure a resolution. Though I myself will argue in favor of the view that justice, properly speaking, is one fundamental value among many, it is my hope that an appreciation for the theoretical significance of the question ‘What is the conceptual identity of justice?’ will motivate future work that confirms, expands upon, or even contradicts my view. Only when more work has been done to answer this question ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Fairness, Efficiency, and Value Theory
• 3 Defeasible Luck Equality
• 4 Cohen’s Equivocal Attack on Rawls’s Basic Structure Restriction
• 5 Narrow Justice
• 6 Fairness and Democratic Legitimacy
• 7 Conclusion
• Index