A Theory of Justice

Philosophy and public affairs, 1985

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.

2003

Abstract: This is the first volume of Equality and Justice, a six-volume collection of the most important articles of the twentieth century on the topic of justice and equality.

2013

Some of the earliest Western ideas about the virtues of character gave justice a prominent position, but if moral philosophy has made any progress at all in the past two centuries, we might think it worthwhile to reconsider what that virtue involves. Kant seems (even to most nonKantians) to have crystallized something important to our relations with others in formulating a proscription against treating others merely as means. And twentiethcentury moral and political theory put the justice of social institutions in the spotlight in an unprecedented way. Here I explore the signi! cance of these developments for what it is to be a just person (the nature of “individual justice”) as it was originally understood, within the eudaimonist virtueethical theories of the ancient Greeks. By any standard, ancient thinking about individual justice seems to have been incomplete in important ways; perhaps, in virtue of these advances in moral theory, we are in position to enrich our thinking about ...

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.

(A) Introduction Since the dawn of human civilization, in the whole range of our legal, political and moral theory, the notion of justice has always occupied a central place. Although any attempt to define the term precisely, scientifically and exhaustively has presented a baffling problem to scholars of all hues. Consequently on account of its multidimensionality, its nature and meaning has always been a dynamic affair. Besides, the problem of definition of justice is beset with the problem of its normative as well as empirical connotations. While in the normative sense it implies the idea of joining or fitting the idea of a bond or tie1 , in an empirical context, it has its relation with the concept of positive law with the result that law and justice becomes sister concepts.