Justice: Finding a Balance Between Telos And Honour of A Social Action (original) (raw)

in his book, "Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do?" grapples with the question of what is justice and how can a state achieve the 'right' way of distributing the things we value or what Rawls would call the "primary goods" which include "income and wealth, duties and rights, powers and opportunities, offices and honours" 1. Sandel like Plato, Aristotle, Locke, and Rousseau tries to produce a framework that could be best adopted by states and societies to make 'just' allocations. To do this he identifies three ways of approaching the distribution of goods: welfare, freedom, and virtue. Sandel's arguments are presented in a way so that a pluralistic democratic society can decide which ideal it values the most because each of these ideals presents a different way of thinking about justice. Sandel addresses that political philosophy is limited to just bringing 'moral clarity' which may be deliberated upon to reach the best possible measure but it cannot explicitly resolve the disagreements between these approaches. In this essay, I shall explore Sandel's conception of justice which is deeply influenced by the Aristotelian notions of justice and good life, and the potential link between honorific and teleological dimensions of justice. Sandel does not claim to settle the debate of 'what is justice?' but as the title of the book suggests, he presents his arguments by using examples elucidating what is the right thing to do. 1.1-The battle of schools of thought: which virtue to value? Sandel presents before us three forms of justice brought about by different schools of thought namely, the utilitarian, the libertarian, and the liberal egalitarian according to the virtue valued by each of these schools. The idea of maximizing 'welfare' is often seen in utilitarian arguments which are summed up in Bentham's words, "greatest happiness for the greatest number". In a market society, maximising welfare, and improving the standards of living makes one value 'prosperity', and scholars like Bentham presents a 'felicific calculus' to measure happiness which does not account for quality. Liberalism proposes that the just society in its constitution and its laws "seeks to provide a framework within which its citizens can pursue their values and ends, consistent with a similar liberty for others." 2 This defies the utilitarian conception because it places 'right' above 'good' in two senses, first, "the priority