Political Science Notes – On Theories Of Justice – For W.B.C.S. Examination.

রাষ্ট্রবিজ্ঞানের নোট – ন্যায়বিচারের তত্ত্বসমূহ – WBCS পরীক্ষা।

Justice is one of the most important moral and political concepts.  The word comes from the Latin jus, meaning right or law.  The Oxford English Dictionary defines the “just” person as one who typically “does what is morally right” and is disposed to “giving everyone his or her due,” offering the word “fair” as a synonym.  But philosophers want to get beyond etymology and dictionary definitions to consider, for example, the nature of justice as both a moral virtue of character and a desirable quality of political society, as well as how it applies to ethical and social decision-making.Continue Reading Political Science Notes – On Theories Of Justice – For W.B.C.S. Examination.

 Typically the article considers not only their theories of justice but also how philosophers apply their own theories to controversial social issues—for example, to civil disobedience, punishment, equal opportunity for women, slavery, war, property rights, and international relations.

For Plato, justice is a virtue establishing rational order, with each part performing its appropriate role and not interfering with the proper functioning of other parts. Aristotle says justice consists in what is lawful and fair, with fairness involving equitable distributions and the correction of what is inequitable.  For Augustine, the cardinal virtue of justice requires that we try to give all people their due; for Aquinas, justice is that rational mean between opposite sorts of injustice, involving proportional distributions and reciprocal transactions.  Hobbes believed justice is an artificial virtue, necessary for civil society, a function of the voluntary agreements of the social contract; for Hume, justice essentially serves public utility by protecting property (broadly understood).  For Kant, it is a virtue whereby we respect others’ freedom, autonomy, and dignity by not interfering with their voluntary actions, so long as those do not violate others’ rights; Mill said justice is a collective name for the most important social utilities, which are conducive to fostering and protecting human liberty.  Rawls analyzed justice in terms of maximum equal liberty regarding basic rights and duties for all members of society, with socio-economic inequalities requiring moral justification in terms of equal opportunity and beneficial results for all; and various post-Rawlsian philosophers develop alternative conceptions.

Western philosophers generally regard justice as the most fundamental of all virtues for ordering interpersonal relations and establishing and maintaining a stable political society.  By tracking the historical interplay of these theories, what will be advocated is a developing understanding of justice in terms of respecting persons as free, rational agents.  One may disagree about the nature, basis, and legitimate application of justice, but this is its core.

Ancient Greece

For all their originality, even Plato’s and Aristotle’s philosophies did not emerge in a vacuum.  As far back in ancient Greek literature as Homer, the concept of dikaion, used to describe a just person, was important.  From this emerged the general concept of dikaiosune, or justice, as a virtue that might be applied to a political society.  The issue of what does and does not qualify as just could logically lead to controversy regarding the origin of justice, as well as that concerning its essence.  Perhaps an effective aid to appreciating the power of their thought is to view it in the context of the teachings of the Sophists, those itinerant teachers of fifth-century ancient Greece who tried to pass themselves off as “wise” men.  In his trial, Socrates was at pains to dissociate himself from them, after his conviction refusing to save himself, as a typical Sophist would, by employing an act of civil disobedience to escape (Dialogues, pp. 24-26, 52-56; 18b-19d, 50a-54b); Plato is more responsible than anyone else for giving them the bad name that sticks with them to this present time; and Aristotle follows him in having little use for them as instructors of rhetoric, philosophy, values, and the keys to success.  So what did these three great philosophers (literally “lovers of wisdom”) find so ideologically objectionable about the Sophists?  The brief answer is, their relativism and their skepticism.  The first important one, Protagoras, captures the former with his famous saying, “Man is the measure of all things—of the things that are, that they are, and of the things that are not, that they are not”; and he speaks to the latter with a declaration of agnosticism regarding the existence of divinities.  Gorgias (Plato named dialogues after both of them) is remembered for a striking three-part statement of skepticism, holding that nothing really exists, that, even if something did exist, we could not grasp it, and that, even if we could grasp something real, we could never express it to anyone else.  If all values are subjective and/or unknowable, then what counts as just gets reduced to a matter of shifting opinion.  We can easily anticipate how readily Sophists would apply such relativism and skepticism to justice.  For example, Thrasymachus (who figures into the first book of Plato’s Republic) is supposed to have said that there must not be any gods who care about us humans because, while justice is our greatest good, men commonly get away with injustice.  But the most significant Sophist statement regarding justice arguably comes from Antiphon, who employs the characteristic distinction between custom (nomos) and nature (physis) with devastating effect.  He claims that the laws of justice, matters of convention, should be obeyed when other people are observing us and may hold us accountable; but, otherwise, we should follow the demands of nature.  The laws of justice, extrinsically derived, presumably involve serving the good of others, the demands of nature, which are internal, serving self-interest.  He even suggests that obeying the laws of justice often renders us helpless victims of those who do not (First, pp. 211, 232, 274, 264-266).  If there is any such objective value as natural justice, then it is reasonable for us to attempt a rational understanding of it.  On the other hand, if justice is merely a construction of customary agreement, then such a quest is doomed to frustration and failure.  With this as a backdrop, we should be able to see what motivated Plato and Aristotle to seek a strong alternative.

a. Plato

Plato’s masterful Republic (to which we have already referred) is most obviously a careful analysis of justice, although the book is far more wide-ranging than that would suggest.  Socrates, Plato’s teacher and primary spokesman in the dialogue, gets critically involved in a discussion of that very issue with three interlocutors early on.  Socrates provokes Cephalus to say something which he spins into the view that justice simply boils down to always telling the truth and repaying one’s debts.  Socrates easily demolishes this simplistic view with the effective logical technique of a counter-example:  if a friend lends you weapons, when he is sane, but then wants them back to do great harm with them, because he has become insane, surely you should not return them at that time and should even lie to him, if necessary to prevent great harm.  Secondly, Polemarchus, the son of Cephalus, jumps into the discussion, espousing the familiar, traditional view that justice is all about giving people what is their due.  But the problem with this bromide is that of determining who deserves what.  Polemarchus may reflect the cultural influence of the Sophists, in specifying that it depends on whether people are our friends, deserving good from us, or foes, deserving harm.  It takes more effort for Socrates to destroy this conventional theory, but he proceeds in stages:  (1) we are all fallible regarding who are true friends, as opposed to true enemies, so that appearance versus reality makes it difficult to say how we should treat people; (2) it seems at least as significant whether people are good or bad as whether they are our friends or our foes; and (3) it is not at all clear that justice should excuse, let alone require, our deliberately harming anyone (Republic, pp. 5-11; 331b-335e).  If the first inadequate theory of justice was too simplistic, this second one was downright dangerous.

Aristotle

After working with Plato at his Academy for a couple of decades, Aristotle was understandably most influenced by his teacher, also adopting, for example, a virtue theory of ethics.  Yet part of Aristotle’s greatness stems from his capacity for critical appropriation, and he became arguably Plato’s most able critic as well as his most famous follower in wanting to develop a credible alternative to Sophism.  Book V of his great Nicomachean Ethics deals in considerable depth with the moral and political virtue of justice.  It begins vacuously enough with the circular claim that it is the condition that renders us just agents inclined to desire and practice justice.  But his analysis soon becomes more illuminating when he specifies it in terms of what is lawful and fair.  What is in accordance with the law of a state is thought to be conducive to the common good and/or to that of its rulers.  In general, citizens should obey such law in order to be just.  The problem is that civil law can itself be unjust in the sense of being unfair to some, so that we need to consider special justice as a function of fairness.  He analyzes this into two sorts:  distributive justice involves dividing benefits and burdens fairly among members of a community, while corrective justice requires us, in some circumstances, to try to restore a fair balance in interpersonal relations where it has been lost.  If a member of a community has been unfairly benefited or burdened with more or less than is deserved in the way of social distributions, then corrective justice can be required, as, for example, by a court of law.  Notice that Aristotle is no more an egalitarian than Plato was—while a sort of social reciprocity may be needed, it must be of a proportional sort rather than equal.  Like all moral virtues, for Aristotle, justice is a rational mean between bad extremes.  Proportional equality or equity involves the “intermediate” position between someone’s unfairly getting “less” than is deserved and unfairly getting “more” at another’s expense.  The “mean” of justice lies between the vices of getting too much and getting too little, relative to what one deserves, these being two opposite types of injustice, one of “disproportionate excess,” the other of disproportionate “deficiency” (Nicomachean, pp. 67-74, 76; 1129a-1132b, 1134a).

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