Why Justice?
Bill Gates has more money than the combined wealth of 45% of his fellow Americans. The richest 1 percent of Americans own nearly half the nation’s financial wealth. Almost a quarter of Americans live on incomes inadequate to support them in decent lives. More black men are in prison than in college. And so it goes. Why a person might be moved to say "There is no justice!"
Such a remark, There is no justice, could also be taken to mean that the very idea of justice has a poor attendance record in conversations about public policy, and when it does show up, it seems tongue-tied. What I mean by this is that our leaders talk about productivity, economic growth, and national security, but only rarely about justice. Moreover, when people do refer to justice or fairness or human rights, no one knows what these words mean except that they honor the one who uses them. After all, says the cynic, who knows what justice is, anyway? Let’s pursue something we can understand&emdash;like growth. For that matter, why not simply pursue wealth and power, forgetting justice altogether? Let the law of the jungle prevail: the strong do what they will and the weak suffer what they must, as one of my students recently put it.
Before we abandon justice, let’s consider what we would be giving up. What is justice? The most basic philosophical conception of justice is that it is the ultimate value of political life. Just as we can say that art, at least traditionally, aspires to beauty, and inquiry aspires to knowledge, so we can say that politics aspires to justice. This does not describe politics as it really exists, but politics as it ought to be. We’re making a normative, not a descriptive statement when we say that politics aims at justice. Yet it is not a gratuitous norm: it can no more be discarded from politics than truth can be discarded from science.
Now one more basic question. What is politics? Politics is the way we arrange how we shall be governed. Politics refers to the processes by which we organize and operate the institutions of power within which and next to which we live. Justice, then, is what we are committed to trying to achieve in our institutions of power, just as truth is what we are committed to when we communicate with each other. In reality, you may be trying to deceive me when you talk to me; but your deception only works because the aim of speaking is understood to be truth. Politicians may well be working to legislate their class interests rather than justice. But in the same way that a liar necessarily pretends that what he says is true, politicians necessarily represent their causes as just.
Justice, then, is what politics aims at. But that doesn’t tell us what sorts of power relations are just. In earlier times, justice was conceived as the kind of social harmony that would result from obedience to those who deserved to be obeyed. Those who deserved to be obeyed were either the wisest, like Plato’s philosopher kings, or the noblest by birth as was claimed by hereditary monarchs. Or perhaps we should obey simply the strongest, as is suggested by Hobbes and Machiavelli, or the most charismatic, as has happened in modern times. The American constitution was written to give political power to property owners on the grounds that those who own the country ought to govern it.
Most people today would rebel at these various forms of elitism, and this itself is an important historical development. We reject the idea that that orderly obedience to an elite is the standard of justice. Instead, we think that fairness lies at the heart of justice. And fairness means two things: some degree of parity or equity in the distribution of social goods, including wealth; and having an equal share in the decision making about how we are governed. In other words, the modern idea of justice is democratic.
Democratic justice has achieved this status not just because it is an attractive idea and therefore contagious. The democratic idea has caught on for two historical reasons: One is that capitalist society increasingly requires an educated work force that is willing to work, and who must therefore believe that the existing order is fair and legtimate. The second, and related, reason is the development of the means of communication, including literacy. Conversation about political matters now extends to include, potentially, everyone on the face of the earth. We live in a highly interconnected world in which all people are at least within earshot of the community of discourse. Political discourse claims to address everyone and seeks to persuade everyone. Therefore, the aim of politics has to be something acceptable to everyone. The founding fathers of our nation carried on a conversation among white male property owners, all of whom could agree that the country would be best governed by men like themselves. Native Americans, African slaves and women were out of the loop as a matter of course. Over time, more kinds of people became literate, got organized, and fought their way into the conversation, to the point now where, at least in principle, everyone is in the conversation and everyone’s interests are supposed to count. Of course that’s only in principle; in reality, the interests and the voices of many are excluded from the councils of the real decision makers. Yet the principle is real; lip service counts. The excluded can use it to demand a seat at the table.
The democratic idea, that everyone counts, changes not just the results of political activity, but the most fundamental ground rule of that activity: what counts as justice. It means that justice has to be understood as social equality and democratic decision-making, because it is only this understanding of justice that can, in the last analysis, be accepted by everyone. When everyone is addressed by political discourse, its purpose has to be everyone’s purpose.
But we started with the question whether there could be some goal of politics other than justice.. What’s wrong, for example, with the pursuit of economic growth? At least we know what it is, and we can measure how much of it we are achieving, while justice is the subject of endless dispute. But economic growth is not of equal interest or benefit to everyone. Economic growth is good for those who own most of the economy, and not so good for those whose jobs are eliminated by increases in productivity or who must put up with the pollution growth causes to our culture, our souls, and our environment. So it looks like economic growth is not a value acceptable by everyone. We can’t escape the question whether economic growth produces justice.
Why not toss justice into the ashcan of history&emdash;as it may seem those who call the shots in our society have actually done. If they were to be honest, they might acknowledge that their real principle of action is: "the strong do what they will and the weak suffer what they must." There is nothing impossible in adopting such a principle for oneself or one’s corporation or one’s class. But notice this: it is not something that can be used to address the rest of us in order to win our assent to something. The principle of injustice can be employed only by those who impose their will by coercion or by deception. The corporate elite of today use both: the coercive arm of the law and the military to defend their interests, and the systematic mobilization of propaganda through the media.
The democratic conception of justice is a powerful idea. It forces everyone on to the same playing field where all must play by rules that are acceptable to all. This means that those of us who want to build a society that lives up to its claims of democracy must keep the idea of justice in play: it gives us the undeniable right to require of everyone that they justify their politics by principles acceptable to everyone. It makes politics everybody’s business and denies power a place to hide. Justice. What a beautiful word!
I’m Clayton Morgareidge for the Old Mole Variety Hour.
March 27, 2000
Created by clayton@lclark.edu
5/11/00