Justice

Eight steps to the hardest question in the city: when liberty and equality collide over who gets what, what does justice require?

A course on the thought of Political Philosophy.

What you will learn

  • State the question of distributive justice and why a snapshot of inequality cannot by itself settle it (Pen's parade).
  • Name the three competing principles — desert, need, equality — and show how context selects among them (the £100 case).
  • See why justice is the first virtue of institutions: not one rule but the standard by which a community's basic structure is judged.
  • State Aristotle's account of distributive justice as geometric proportion: shares should track a relevant criterion of merit.
  • Identify the built-in dispute: all agree distribution should be 'according to merit,' but disagree about which merit counts (free birth, wealth, virtue).
  • Distinguish distributive from corrective justice, and see why desert is the market's intuitive creed.
  • State the labour-mixing argument: self-ownership → ownership of labour → ownership of what labour appropriates from the commons.
  • State the two provisos (non-spoilage; 'enough and as good') and explain how money supersedes them and legitimates unequal holdings.

Course outline

  1. The Question of Social Justice — What justice in distribution requires when liberty and equality collide — and the three rival answers the rest of the course will test: reward by desert, relief by need, or shares by equality, with…
  2. Desert: Justice as Proportion to Merit — The oldest answer: Aristotle's distributive justice as geometric proportion — equals treated equally, unequals unequally, shares tracking merit — and the quarrel built into it from the start over…
  3. Property: The Labour Theory and What We Own — Locke's answer: we own ourselves and our labour, and by mixing labour with the unowned world we make it our property — bounded by the provisos of spoilage and "enough and as good," until money…
  4. Exploitation: The Labour That Is Taken — Marx's indictment: under the wage system the worker creates more value than the wage returns, and the surplus is taken by the owner of capital — so the real injustice is not unequal shares but the…
  5. Justice as Fairness: The Modern Landmark — Rawls's own theory: choose the principles of justice from behind a veil of ignorance, not knowing who you will be, and reason will pick equal liberties, fair opportunity, and the difference principle…
  6. Luck and Choice: Did Rawls Go Far Enough? — Dworkin's refinement: a just distribution should be endowment-insensitive but ambition-sensitive — neutralizing the brute luck of birth and talent while holding people responsible for their own…
  7. The Objection from the Right — Nozick's libertarian reply: justice is historical, not patterned — a distribution is just if it arose by just steps, whatever its shape. The difference principle is a pattern, and liberty upsets…
  8. The Objection from the Left, and the Verdict — Cohen's egalitarian critique: the difference principle still lets the talented hold society to ransom — demanding incentive pay to do work they could do anyway — so justice needs not only just…

Works read in this course

  • A Theory of Justice — Rawls (1971, rev. 1999): the original position, the veil of ignorance, the two principles, the difference principle — the landmark of modern political philosophy
  • Nicomachean Ethics — Aristotle: distributive justice as proportion to merit — the oldest theory of who deserves what
  • Two Treatises of Government — Locke (1689): the labour theory of property — mixing one's labour with the world makes it one's own
  • Critique of the Gotha Programme — Marx (1875): 'from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs' — the communist ideal beyond bourgeois right
  • Anarchy, State, and Utopia — Nozick (1974): the entitlement theory and the libertarian objection — justice is historical, not patterned; liberty upsets the pattern
  • A Matter of Principle / Sovereign Virtue — Dworkin: equality of resources — the auction, the envy test, brute luck vs option luck, the insurance scheme
  • If You're an Egalitarian, How Come You're So Rich? / Rescuing Justice and Equality — Cohen: the egalitarian critique — the incentives argument lets the talented hold society to ransom; justice needs an ethos, not only institutions

Terms introduced

distributive justice, desert, need, the original position, veil of ignorance, the two principles, difference principle, primary goods, maximin, morally arbitrary, common asset, entitlement theory, patterned justice, exploitation, surplus value, brute luck

Part of the Simposeum course library.