Scarce Justice: The Accuracy, Scope and Depth of Justice (original) (raw)

On the Conceptual Status of Justice (doctoral dissertation)

Queen's University, 2015

In contemporary debates about justice, political philosophers take themselves to be engaged with a subject that’s narrower than the whole of morality. Many contemporary liberals, notably John Rawls, understand this narrowness in terms of context specificity. On their view, justice is the part of morality that applies to the context of a society’s institutions, but only has indirect application to the context of citizens’ personal lives (unlike the rest of morality). In contrast, many value pluralists, notably G.A. Cohen, understand justice’s narrowness in terms of singularity against a plural background. On their view, justice is one fundamental value amongst a plurality of fundamental values. The purpose of my thesis is to establish that the pluralist conception of justice’s narrowness is (a) theoretically significant and (b) true. To establish its theoretical significance, I argue that proper attention to the ways in which different understandings of narrowness inform the work of contemporary egalitarians explains a considerable amount of disagreement between them concerning the content and scope of distributive justice. On the one hand, I’ll argue that if we understand justice’s narrowness in the manner Cohen and other pluralists do, i.e., understand a conception of justice to be a conception of a particular fundamental value, then both luck-egalitarianism and the claim that justice extends to the personal context are compelling. On the other hand, I’ll argue that if we understand justice’s narrowness in a contextual manner, i.e., understand justice to comprise one or more all-things-considered principles adopted for the institutional context, then both luck-egalitarianism and the claim that justice extends to the personal context prove implausible. To establish the truth of the pluralist conception of narrowness, I argue first, that the contextual understanding is only plausible if fairness should be understood procedurally instead of substantively; and second, that substantive fairness cannot be eliminated, as specifying the content of procedural fairness requires a substantive criterion. The upshot is that justice’s narrowness is best understood in terms of singularity against a plural background, rather than in terms of context specificity.

Two Concepts of Justice—and of its scope

I argue that there are two concepts of distributive justice in play in debates on whether principles of distributive justice apply to the global sphere. Critics of the idea that the scope of distributive justice is restricted assume, without argument, a particular conception of justice in which justice-based evaluations apply to basic-structural institutional actions only instrumentally, whilst applying intrinsically to distributive outcomes for people. I call these outcomes-focused views. I show that at least one view in the literature on global justice, the agency argument, appeals to a distinct concept of social distributive justice where the descriptors 'justice' and 'injustice', intrinsically apply to the actions of certain types of institutional agents, and only derivatively to the description of states of affairs such as distributive outcomes. This alternative view is treatment-focused and deontological. It focuses on special goods that are only available as a matter of how one is treated by political institutions: relational-goods. It is also sensitive to considerations of fairness in practical reason in ways that outcomes-focused views are not. I show why, on this agency-focused approach, the scope of principles of distributive justice is restricted to how people who are subject to special institutional authority are treated. My main aim in this paper is to demonstrate that on a competitor approach to justice the anti-scope restriction arguments fail, and that the competitor approach is not obviously incoherent. Thus criticising scope restriction by assuming an outcomes-focused approach to distributive justice begs the question against agency-focused arguments. This shows the real dispute is at a more fundamental level.

An Empirical Inquiry into the Relation of Corrective Justice to Distributive Justice

2006

We report the results of three experiments examining the long-standing debate within tort theory over whether corrective justice is independent of, or parasitic on, distributive justice. Using a "hypothetical societies" paradigm that serves as an impartial reasoning device and permits experimental manipulation of societal conditions, we first tested support for corrective justice in a society where individual merit played no role in determining economic standing. Participants expressed strong support for a norm of corrective justice in response to intentional and unintentional torts in both just and unjust societies. The second experiment tested support for corrective justice in a society where race, rather than individual merit, determined economic standing. The distributive justice manipulation exerted greater effect here, particularly on liberal participants, but support for corrective justice remained strong among non-liberal participants, even against a background of racially unjust distributive conditions. The third experiment partially replicated the first experiment and found that the availability of government-funded insurance had little effect on demands for corrective justice. Overall, the results suggest that, while extreme distributive injustice can moderate support for corrective justice, the norm of corrective justice often dominates judgments about compensatory duties associated with tortious harms.

The Many Faces of Justice and Its Structural Foundations

By reviewing some key sociologists that deal with this distinction (Simmel, Durkheim, Parsons, Luhmann), I intend to identify the paradoxical and multilayered character of the inclusion/exclusion-situations (1). Having this framework in mind, I shall reconstruct the foundations of three contemporary approaches to justice (F. Hayek, J. Rawls and G. Teubner) in order to relate them with the inclusion/exclusion-paradoxes and assess their normative orientation and how unilateral their conception of justice may be. Methodologically, the selection of these three authors illustrates the focus of the theories of justice on three sociologically distinguishable operational levels: the interaction, the national-institutional and the supranational level. In this vein, I begin with the liberal conception of Friedrich Hayek, whose concept of justice focuses on the individual abilities to deal with exclusions and overlooks the institutional aspects of justice as well as the conditions of sub-inclu...

Justice seems not to be for all: Exploring the scope of justice

The idea that “justice is for everyone” seems to be over. A justice perception can have unfair consequences for those who are perceived not to be included within the boundaries of fairness. This is what the scope of justice is all about: who is within and who is outside of the “justice boundaries”. This paper intends to clarify the concept and explain how social psychologists work with it in real-life contexts. We argue that the scope of justice is a key concept that helps us to understand a broad range of intergroup conflicts, besides being an understudied phenomenon that motivates a variety of justice-related issues such as deservingness, animal rights, discrimination and environmental conflict. We also discuss and review the relevant literature concerning the psychological and social functions of the scope of justice, highlighting its possible antecedents and consequences. Finally, we outline the current applied research into the role played by processes used to legitimize damaging behaviors against people who are perceived to be outside of the scope of justice. In light of this concept, the “justice is for everyone” maxim should probably be changed to “justice is for those who are not excluded from our boundaries of fairness”.

Justice: Simple Theories, Complex Applications

The Southern Journal of Philosophy, 1987

A theory ofjustice aims to proviL.: an account of what L4ermines the validity of social practices. It is meant to inform the decisions ofjurists, voters, legislators, policy makers, constitutional theorists, etc. Applying a theory of justice runs into paradoxes seldom explicitly examined. In theory, proposed principles have a simple relation to existing social practices-the practices are not a product of the theory. In application, principles are complexly related to social practices because repeated applications are not independent of each other over time. Those applications occurring later in a series encounter a social reality partially molded by those occurring earlier. Earlier applications are among the causes of social practices forming the contexts of later applications. Later applications depend upon references to those earlier for interpreting meanings and for determining extensions of terms not fixed by theory alone.

The Aim of a Theory of Justice

Ethical Theory and Moral Practice (2012) 15: 7-21

Amartya Sen argues that for the advancement of justice identification of ‘perfect’ justice is neither necessary nor sufficient. He replaces ‘perfect’ justice with comparative justice. Comparative justice limits itself to comparing social states with respect to degrees of justice. Sen’s central thesis is that identifying ‘perfect’ justice and comparing imperfect social states are ‘analytically disjoined’. This essay refutes Sen’s thesis by demonstrating that to be able to make adequate comparisons we need to identify and integrate criteria of comparison. This is precisely the aim of a theory of justice (such as John Rawls’s theory): identifying, integrating and ordering relevant principles of justice. The same integrated criteria that determine ‘perfect’ justice enable us to compare imperfect social states. Sen’s alternative approach, which is based on social choice theory, is incapable of avoiding contrary, indeterminate or incoherent directives where plural principles of justice conflict.