Journal of Economic MethodologyVolume 19, Issue 2, 2012Special Issue: Values and Justice | |||
Articles
Values and justice
Abstract
As we see the world around us, it is difficult not to be moved by the thought that there are huge injustices in the world in which we live. The difficult question that has to be addressed is how justice and injustice can be diagnosed and scrutinized. Even though we may be moved by an immediate sense of injustice, and that sense may well be very strong and even overpowering, it would be hard to deny that ultimately the diagnosis of justice and injustice must depend on our values – and in particular our examined and scrutinized values. This is where we need political philosophy in general and a theory of justice in particular. And that leads to the next question: what kind of a theory should a theory of justice be? What do we need from a theory of justice?
I have tried to address these issues in a recent book, called The Idea of Justice,1 and I shall take the liberty of discussing some of the arguments presented there, before I go on to consider their implications for the relationship between values and justice. Mainstream theories of justice in contemporary political philosophy differ from each other in many respects, but they have a general approach in common – the approach of ‘social contract’ theory. The social contract approach was pioneered by Thomas Hobbes in the seventeenth century, and it has been the strongest influence in the analysis of justice from the eighteenth century to our own time. The distinguishing features of the approach include taking the characterization of ‘just institutions’ to be the principal – and often the only identified – task of the theory of justice. This way of seeing justice is woven in different ways around the idea of an imagined ‘social contract’ – a hypothetical contract about social organization that the people of a sovereign state can be imagined to have endorsed and accepted. Initiated by Thomas Hobbes, major contributions were made in this line of thinking in the period of European Enlightenment by John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant (even though the reach of Kant's philosophical analysis is immensely larger than the rather limited domain of social contract theory).
The contractarian approach has remained the dominant influence in contemporary political philosophy, led by the most prominent political philosopher of our time, John Rawls, whose classic book, A Theory of Justice published in 1971, presents a far-reaching statement of a particular version of the social contract approach to justice.2 The principal theories of justice in contemporary political philosophy, coming not only from Rawls but also from Robert Nozick, Ronald Dworkin, David Gauthier and others, share in common, explicitly or by implication, the idea of a social contract that identifies ideal social institutions (even though the substantive contents of their respective theories are different from each other in terms of the diagnosis of what exactly the social contract should demand). Dworkin's ideal social institutions are not the same as those of Rawls, nor are the Rawlsian ideal institutions the same as those of Nozick's, but they all have tended to see the theory of justice as being engaged in identifying a particular set of ideal social institutions. Since these institutions have to be implemented, they all need a sovereign state that does the work in line with the respectively identified social contract.
There was, however, another approach to justice that also emerged at about the same time in the works of other Enlightenment thinkers – other than the social contract theorists of that period. These theorists did not erect a fully developed structure of a theory of justice, but the ingredients of a different approach – different from the social contract theory – which they helped to identify, can be developed from their alternative understanding of the demands of justice. These theorists (including Adam Smith, the Marquis de Condorcet and Mary Wollstonecraft in the eighteenth century, and extended later to John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx, among others) took a variety of approaches that differed in many ways from each other, but shared a common interest in making comparisons between different ways in which people's lives may go, jointly influenced by the working of institutions, people's actual behaviour, their social interactions and other factors that significantly impact on what actually happens. My attempt at advancing a theory of justice closely relates to this alternative foundation.
The analytical – and rather mathematical – discipline of ‘social choice theory’, which had its origin in the works of French mathematicians in the eighteenth century, in particular the Marquis de Condorcet, but also others like Borda, and which has been revived and reformulated in our times by Kenneth Arrow, also belongs to this second line of investigation. I must confess that I have been very involved in the development and use of social choice theory. In that work, I have focused particularly on the exploration of the constructive possibilities of the approach (differing in that respect from Kenneth Arrow's principal focus on generating impossibility results), and I have been involved over some decades in the derivation and elucidation of the demands of justice, with the help of social choice theory, supplemented by general – and largely non-mathematical – political and moral reasoning.
The approach presented in my book The Idea of Justice shares the general Enlightenment interest in relying on reasoning in general and public reasoning in particular, and in this respect there is something very substantially in common between the two alternative disciplines of reasoning that emerged from the intellectual climate of the Enlightenment period, that is, between the Hobbesian and Kantian reasoning (with its successors today, such as the Rawlsian social contract approach) and the reasoning of Smith and Condorcet (with its successors today, such as normative social choice theory). The focus of public reasoning about justice in the social choice approach involves important departures from contractarian reasoning that yields ideal social institutions, with a presumption of completely ‘appropriate’ behaviour on the part of all the people. This alternative, which I have tried to explore and develop more fully, concentrates instead on making comparative judgements about the justice and injustice of different ‘social realizations’, which include the way the actual lives of people go and the freedoms they enjoy. The social realizations do not ignore the institutions used and the principles that are invoked as guide to human behaviour, since realizations are not just about the ultimate outcomes but also about how these outcomes come about. But this alternative approach, which I am trying to develop, has to take a direct interest in the lives that people are actually able to lead, rather than concentrating only on institutions and principles of behaviour (with the hope – explicit or implicit – that they would yield the kind of lives that can be reasonably desired).
There are three principal departures in the theory of justice I am presenting, in contrast with the social contract approach. First, rather than beginning with asking what is perfect justice (a question in the answer to which there could be substantial differences even among very reasonable people), I argue for following Condorcet and Smith in asking about the identification of clear cases of injustice on which agreement could emerge on the basis of reasoning. In arguing, for example, for the abolition of slavery, as both the Marquis the Condorcet and Adam Smith did, they did not have to seek an agreement on the nature of the perfectly just society. The same can be said today, I would argue, about abolishing famines, chronic undernourishment, preventable epidemics, the absence of basic medical care, lack of schooling of children or the prevalence of torture of captives.
Second, our focus need not be only on institutions, in contrast with the social contract approach, which is interested primarily in the identification of ‘just institutions’, and we can examine instead the nature of lives that people are actually able to lead. Many social contract theorists believe that with the right institutions and some kind of an implicit promise from everyone that they would behave properly, the resulting human lives would be as good as they can be expected to be. But that presumption is a hypothesis, and if it goes wrong, there is nothing in the procedure to make iterative corrections. No less importantly, there is no systematic attempt to judge the quality of the lives and freedoms that people would enjoy, and the outcomes are seen as okay because they would have emanated from an allegedly just process, rather than these lives being assessed as social realizations that need to be evaluated.
Third, unlike the social contract approach which, by construction, must be confined to the people of a particular sovereign state, the alternative approach can involve people from anywhere in the world, since the focus is on reasoning and, when possible, reasoned agreement, rather than on a state-based social contract to be implemented by a sovereign state. The departure makes reasoning on ‘global justice’ possible, even in the absence of a global sovereign state, which is essential for addressing such problems as global economic crises, or global warming, or prevention and management of global pandemics, such as the AIDS epidemic.
I should now return to the question with which we began – about the relation of values and justice. In the light of the preceding discussion, there is a crucial need (1) to examine the world in the light of the values we have, and (2) to examine these values themselves and to scrutinize the justification we can give for them. It is for facilitating a serious and deep re-examination that Adam Smith invoked his innovative device of an imagined ‘impartial spectator’ who looks at our choices and behaviour, using a wide set of alternative values – possibly quite different from those which we instinctively accept – and invites us to think critically about our own values, in the light of other ones which we can consider and scrutinize.
Smith distinguishes with great sophistication the different kinds of reasons people have in taking an interest in the lives of others, separating out sympathy, generosity, public spirit and other motivations. Even though he acknowledged the role of mental attitudes and predispositions, he went on to discuss how reasoning, which is at the heart of rationality, must have a big role in preventing us from being – consciously or unconsciously – too self-centred, or thoughtlessly uncaring.
This is where the Impartial Spectator comes in as a device for reasoned self-scrutiny. There may not, of course, be any really impartial spectator in the world, but we can persuade ourselves to look at the values and priorities that others have, and then examine them all with as much objectivity as we can bring into the exercise. Attempts at being objective can be helped by our putting on other people's hats – even their identities – and asking ourselves: how would our choices, our values look to them?
Central to the Smithian approach is our willingness to see critically what we observe around us.3 The sense of comfort that is often associated with being content with the world as it is can seriously hamper the pursuit of justice. This understanding goes strongly against a line of thought that was powerfully presented by Friedrich Nietzshe. ‘The Christian resolve to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad’, said Nietzshe. I think I can, with some effort, understand what Nietzsche meant, but it is hard for me, even with a lot of effort, to see that Nietzshe's hypothesis helps us to understand the causation or resilience of the nastiness of the world in which we live. Nor, I must insist (this I do as a thoroughly unreligious person), does it offer any obvious insight into the lives and achievements of Martin Luther King, or Mother Theresa, or Desmond Tutu, who have tried to reduce injustice in the world and have done so with non-negligible success.
So, both our values and the world around us demand systematic scrutiny. And the theory of justice that I have been trying to present, and which I briefly discussed earlier on, can help us in this scrutiny. This is a good moment to ask: in what way, or ways, does this theory of justice – broadly speaking the ‘social choice’ approach to justice – help in the exercise of public reasoning about values and worlds? To examine this question, it is useful to see how the particular departures of this theory of justice from the mainstream ‘social contract’ approach help in this exercise. These departures were identified earlier, and it is important to see that each of the departures relates to answering the question: what kind of a theory of justice do we need as a theory of practical reason?
Consider the first departure – focusing on comparatives rather than on the superlative, or the transcendental (or something that cannot be transcended). The point is not only that in any actual choice we tend to be confined to non-superlative alternatives. The important issues involve both the non-necessity and the non-sufficiency of beginning with the diagnosis of an ideal. There is a basic mathematical point here. Even if two persons agree that of the three distinct alternatives, one option, let us call it a, is the ideal and clearly the best of the three options a, b and c, that still would not tell us what we should do if the actual choice is between two non-ideal alternatives, b and c. If one person puts a above b and that above c, and the other places a above c and that above b, they do agree on the ideal, to wit, a, but since they rank b and c in exactly the opposite way, the diagnosis of an agreed ideal does not tell us anything much at all about what would be better to choose if we were to face the choice over b and c. In choosing between non-ideal alternatives, as we tend to do in every actual choice, the identification of an ideal alternative (whether or not feasible) is, thus, not sufficient.
Nor is it particularly helpful, since the primitive intuition that we can assess non-ideal alternatives, such as b and c, in terms of their closeness to the ideal a does not work since the differences of social alternatives involve different dimensions, and distance and closeness cannot be assessed without going into exactly the kind of exercise that comparative, rather than transcendental, judgements demand. I have discussed the distinction in some detail in the book and will not repeat that here.
If non-sufficiency is an important limitation of the theoretical strategy of proceeding from the ideal, non-necessity is another. Even if all agree that b is clearly less unjust than c, and we have no great problem in choosing between them, we may still not be sure what the ideal situation is, whether it is a, or perhaps b itself. We do not have to compare other alternatives to b and cto sensibly choose between b and c.
The non-necessity of agreeing on the ideal is a huge relief for a grounded theory of comparative assessment, since we can in fact agree on many comparisons without being able to agree on all comparisons, and without being able to identify the ideal alternative. We may disagree on the exact importance to be attached to considerations of, say, liberty over those of economic equity, but we can still agree that people dying of illnesses for which remedies are known and can be cheaply produced and much more widely used, is clearly unjust, or that prosecuting raped women for adultery is a gross violation of the demands of justice. There are issues on which agreements may emerge and may be adequate for policy change, without pre-requiring us to identify – and agree on – what the ideal situation in the world would be.
I turn now to the second point of departure, that is about changing the focus of attention from institutions to social realizations. A social realization is a more inclusive concept, and it can include the importance of particular institutions when they are important, in addition to the quality of the consequences they generate. Even though death from hunger is itself terrible, people being forcibly starved to death is not the same thing, from the point of view of justice, as people dying from lack of food because of lack of resources. Both the cases are intolerable and their removal is a matter of justice in both cases, but the injustice involved in death through forcible starvation has an element of horror that makes the bad situation even worse. When the Irish-origin Mr Malone in Bernard Shaw's Man and Superman complained about the injustice of London's governmental role in the genesis and continuation of the Irish famines of the 1840s by saying that his people were ‘starved’ to death, he was not only complaining about death from hunger, but something that went beyond that in terms of horror. And yet, Malone was also complaining about the non-prevention of the famine which resulted in so many deaths and so much destitution – that terrible consequence was of significance as well.
So institutions and policies and actions can indeed be significant in themselves, but their consequences for the lives of people are important too. A primarily institutional theory may capture the former set of concerns, but can be insufficiently sensitive about the actual impact of institutions on people's lives, since that impact would depend also on other factors, such as the actual behaviour pattern of the people involved.
In understanding the contrast between an arrangement-focused and a realization-focused view of justice, it is useful to invoke an old distinction from the Sanskrit literature on ethics and jurisprudence. Consider two different words – ‘niti’ and ‘nyaya’ – both of which stand for justice in classical Sanskrit. Among the principal uses of the term niti are organizational propriety and behavioural correctness. In contrast with niti, the term nyaya stands for a comprehensive concept of realized justice. In that line of vision, the roles of institutions, rules and organization, important as they are, have to be assessed in the broader and more inclusive perspective of nyaya, which is inescapably linked with the world that actually emerges, not just the institutions or rules we happen to have.
To consider a particular application, early Indian legal theorists talked disparagingly of what they called matsyanyaya, ‘justice in the world of fish’, where a big fish can freely devour a small fish. We are warned that avoiding matsyanyaya must be an essential part of justice, and it is crucial to make sure that the ‘justice of fish’ is not allowed to invade the world of human beings. The central recognition here is that the realization of justice in the sense of nyaya is not just a matter of judging institutions and rules, but of judging the societies themselves. No matter how proper the established organizations might be, if a big fish could still devour a small fish at will, then that must be a patent violation of human justice as nyaya.
Let me consider an example, which I have discussed in my book on justice, to make the distinction between niti and nyayaclearer. Ferdinand I, the Holy Roman emperor, famously claimed in the sixteenth century: ‘Fiat justitia, et pereat mundus’, which can be translated as: ‘Let justice be done, though the world perish’. This severe maxim could figure as a niti – a very harsh niti – that is advocated by some (indeed Emperor Ferdinand did just that), but it would be hard to accommodate a total catastrophe as an example of a just world, when we understand justice in the broader form of nyaya. If indeed the world does perish, there would be nothing much to celebrate in that accomplishment, even though the stern and severe niti leading to this extreme result could conceivably be defended with very sophisticated arguments of different kinds.
A realization-focused perspective also makes it easier to understand the importance of the prevention of manifest injustice in the world, rather than seeking the perfectly just. As the example of matsyanyaya makes clear, the subject of justice is not merely about trying to achieve – or dreaming about achieving – some perfectly just society or ideal social arrangements, but about preventing manifestly severe injustice (such as avoiding the dreadful state of matsyanyaya). For example, when people agitated for the abolition of slavery in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it was their claim that a society with slavery was totally unjust and can be feasibly eliminated (among the authors mentioned earlier, Adam Smith, Condorcet and Mary Wollstonecraft were quite involved in presenting this perspective). It was the diagnosis of an intolerable injustice in slavery that made abolition an overwhelming priority, and this did not require the search for a consensus on what a perfectly just society would look like.
Those who think that the American civil war which led to the abolition of slavery was a great social achievement (Karl Marx was among those who took that view) would have to be reconciled to the fact that not much can be said in the perspective of social contract theory about the enhancement of justice through the abolition of slavery, since the post-American civil war was still far from an ideally just state, and from a state with ideal institutions. We need a comparative approach that can identify the benefits from the removal of an identified injustice even though the world after that removal would still not be, in any obvious sense, perfectly just.
I should perhaps use this occasion to correct a misunderstanding of my claim that I have seen articulated and critically discussed. I am not arguing against, as some authors have claimed, an ‘ideal’ theory over a practical theory; rather I am concerned with what the subject matter of a theory of justice – with or without simplifications necessary for an ‘ideal theory’. The abstraction of an ‘ideal theory’ may often be helpful in understanding the underlying ideas that even a very practical theory of actual decision making may utilize. That is a completely separate issue from that involved in the discourse over whether our theory – even ideal theory – should be concerned with comparisons of the alternatives involved in a choice, or with the identification of the transcendental best. An ideal theory need not be concerned only with – or even at all with – ideal alternatives. It is important that an alternative theory of justice, based on a different diagnosis of what a theory of justice demands, is not confused as a practical short cut that dispenses with the need for sophisticated theory.
The third departure concerned the identification of the people whose views have to be considered seriously – or (to put it in Smithian terms) – whose views and perspectives can be invoked in assessing our own values and the decisions we take – or can take. In the social contract approach, the search for justice is confined to the citizens of a particular sovereign state, who can be imagined to be in a contractual relation with each other. As a result of this methodology, the people whose views are brought into any specific assessment are citizens of some particular sovereign state for which the pursuit of justice is under discussion. We may demand that the citizens of each sovereign state view citizens of other states (or even stateless people) with compassion, respect and sympathy, satisfying some requirements of ‘minimal humanitarianism’ (as both John Rawls and Thomas Nagel have argued), but ‘the principles of justice’ arrived at for any particular sovereign state would not have any application beyond the limited domain of a specific state.
In contrast with the ‘social contract’ tradition, a ‘social choice’ approach is concerned with public reasoning – and that can go well beyond national boundaries. There is a strong case for an inclusive effort to bring in the perspectives and values of other people, even when they live far away. Indeed, the inputs into the exercise of invoking of the ‘impartial spectator’ can come from far as well as near, as Smith explained. Indeed, as Smith put it:
We can never survey our own sentiments and motives, we can never form any judgment concerning them; unless we remove ourselves, as it were, from our own natural station, and endeavour to view them as at a certain distance from us. But we can do this in no other way than by endeavouring to view them with the eyes of other people, or as other people are likely to view them.4
This is really an invitation to a global dialogue. Smith had no illusion that this would be easy to do, nor did he suffer from the delusion that such an exercise would, in any sense, be perfect. But he did have the conviction that the exercise could still be very useful, and the best should not be made into an enemy of the good.
I must stop now. In investigating the relation between values and justice, I have tried to present the understanding that along with the importance of critically assessing the world in which we live to identify diagnosable injustice, we also have to subject our own values to scrutiny. That scrutiny need not begin with any kind of identification of a perfectly just world – a world of perfectly just institutions. Nor need it be confined only to the justness of institutions (as some mainstream theories of justice do), and we must pay particular attention to the nature of our actual lives and the freedoms we actually enjoy.
In assessing the merits of our own values and priorities, we have a strong case for bringing in the perspectives of others, for a comparative analysis. The others involved need not only be local people, or members of a shared sovereign state. As Smith insisted in utilizing his device of the impartial spectator, the relevant perspectives can easily come from far as well as near. The object of the exercise is to keep our values under constant scrutiny, broadening the base of critical comparison as much as we fruitfully can. Our values about justice may never quite reach perfection – even as we ourselves see them – but we must not interpret that recognition as a counsel of despair.
The world in which we live falls short in terms of justice in many different ways. We have reason to do what we can to remove diagnosable injustice to the extent possible. Subjecting our values to scrutiny by asking probing questions, drawing on many sources, may be a good beginning. Broadening that exercise by considering the perspectives of others – from far as well as near – would make sense here, for reasons that Smith had discussed with much clarity a quarter of a millennium ago.
1. The Idea of Justice (2009).
3. What I am calling the ‘Smithian’ approach here is in sharp contrast with an approach often attributed to Smith – that of quintessentially self-centred human beings working in a world in which the ‘invisible hand’ of the market mechanism produces wonderful results. That view has very little to do with Smith's own understanding of human values, or of the way the market mechanism actually works. I have discussed these diagnostic issues in my ‘Introduction’ to the anniversary edition of Smith's (2009), published on the 250th anniversary of the original publication of the book in 1759; see also Rothschild (2001).
4. Smith (1759).
References
- 1. Rawls, J. 1971. A Theory of Justice, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
- 2. Rawls, J. 1993. Political Liberalism, New York: Columbia University Press.
- 3. Rothschild, E. 2001. Economic Sentiments, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
- 4. Sen, A. 2009. The Idea of Justice London: Penguin, and Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press
- 5. Smith, A. 1759. The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 110London: A. Millar. III, 1, 2, in the 1975 reprint
- 6. Smith, A. 2009. The Theory of Moral Sentiments, New York: Penguin. [CrossRef]
