Justice
Political philosophy
We apply it to
Individual actions, laws, public policies
Ethics
Regarded as one of the four cardinal virtues
Aristotle distinguished between 'universal' justice that corresponded to 'virtue as a whole' and 'particular' justice which had a narrower scope.
Individual vs institutional Justice
Individual
Justice is contrasted with charity on the one hand, and mercy on the other. These are other-regarding virtues
Family: Hume also believed – and philosophical controversy on this point persists until today – that justice has no place in close personal relationships, such as the family, where (it is alleged) each identifies with the others’ interests so strongly that there is no need and no reason for anyone to make claims of personal entitlement.
Philosophy
Utilitarian
Deontological
Religion
"an eye for an eye"
So we cannot, except metaphorically, describe as unjust states of affairs that no agent has contributed to bringing about – unless we think that there is a Divine Being who has ordered the universe in such a way that every outcome is a manifestation of His will.
Agency
Decisions made by individuals / government for individuals or groups of people
Institutional
has to do
with how individual people are treated
Do individuals have a duty to support the institutions set up to deliver justice?
Institutions are established for the purpose of delivering justice on a large scale
Systemic injustice
Although justice is centrally a matter of how individuals are treated, it is also possible to speak of justice for groups – for example when the state is allocating resources between different categories of citizens. Here each group is being treated as though it were a separate individual for purposes of the allocation.
This agency condition, however, is less restrictive than it might at first appear. It by no means excludes the possibility that agents can create injustice by omission – for example by failing to create the institutions or to enact the policies that would deliver vital resources to those who need them. Thus it is now common to speak of ‘systemic injustice’ in the case of bad outcomes that no-one intends to occur but that could be prevented by a shift in social norms or institutional practices. The agents in these cases are all those who by acting together to change these things could invert the injustice, but have so far failed to do so.
Duties not to deceive or defraud
duty of an employer not to discriminate on grounds of race or gender when hiring workers, or the duty of a local government officer to assign public housing to those in greatest need.
Do individuals have a duty to promote social justice?
Notions of egalitarian
Two scenarios
Equality of opportunity The first concerns parents who confer advantages on their children in ways that undermine fair equality of opportunity.
Economic Justice: The second example concerns wage differentials. Might individuals whose talents can bring them high rewards in the labour market have a duty not to make use of their bargaining power, but instead be willing to work for a fair wage – which if fairness is understood in egalitarian terms might mean the same wage as everyone else (perhaps with extra compensation for those whose labour is unusually burdensome)?
Rawls, that ‘those who have the same level of talent and ability and the same willingness to use these gifts should have the same prospects of success regardless of their social class of origin’ then there are myriad ways in which some parents can bestow advantages on their children that other parents cannot – financial benefits, educational opportunities, social contacts, and so forth – that are likely to bring greater success in later life.
Rawls, as we saw above, argued that economic justice meant arranging social and economic inequalities to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged, and in formulating the principle in this way he assumed that some inequalities might serve as incentives to greater production that would also raise the position of the worst-off group in society.
That justice is a matter of how each separate person is treated appears to create problems for theories such as utilitarianism that judge actions and policies on the basis of their overall consequences aggregated across people – assuming that these theories wish to incorporate rather than discard the idea of justice.
Utilitarianism cannot plausibly provide a theory of justice unless it is interpreted in this action-guiding way, in light of what was said above about justice and agency. We also assume that the most likely candidate will be a rule-utilitarian view that treats principles of justice as belonging to the set of rules which when followed by the relevant agents will tend to produce the greatest total utility
But we should not be too hasty to assume that what justice demands is always equality, whether of treatment or of outcome. Perhaps it does so only in a formal sense.
But, as Aristotle among others saw, justice also involves the idea of proportional treatment, which implies recipients getting unequal amounts of whatever good is at issue. If A is twice as deserving or twice as needy as B, justice may require that she receives more than B does.
Equality
When does justice require equality?
One rather obvious case occurs when the members of the group within which the distribution is going to occur have no relevant distinguishing features, so there are no grounds on which some can claim greater shares of benefit than others
Equality is the default principle that applies in the absence of any special claims that can be presented as reasons of justice
Equality also acts as a default in circumstances where, although people may indeed have unequal claims to whatever good is being distributed, we have no reliable way of identifying and measuring those claims.
Morally arbitrary characteristic are irrelevant to just distribution
This captures a widespread intuition that people should not be advantaged or disadvantaged by virtue of their race or gender, but extends it (more controversially) to all personal features with a genetic basis, such as natural talents and inborn dispositions
Responses include MeToo, Climate Change Activism, Black Lives Matter
John Rawls famously described justice it as "the first virtue of social institutions"