Political Philosophy Part 2: Justice

Plato — Justice as Harmony

Plato's Republic (c. 380 BCE) is the founding work of Western political philosophy. The dialogue begins with Socrates being challenged by the Sophist Thrasymachus, who advances the cynical thesis that "justice is the advantage of the stronger" — that what we call justice is simply whatever rules those in power dress up as principle.

Socrates rejects this and proceeds, through the rest of the long dialogue, to construct an alternative. His method is to build an ideal city in speech and ask what justice would look like there — on the grounds that justice in the soul is the same in form as justice in the city, only smaller and harder to see. The just city has three classes (producers, guardians, philosopher-rulers); the just soul has three corresponding parts (appetite, spirit, reason). In both, justice is the proper ordering and harmony of the parts: each does what is suited to its nature, none usurps another's role.

What makes this picture consequential: justice is not a contractual exchange among equal individuals (the modern picture). It is an internal property of a well-ordered whole. The political and the psychological mirror each other. A just polity requires just souls; just souls are produced by a just polity. Justice is, fundamentally, harmony.

Aristotle — Distributive & Corrective

Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics (Book V) introduced a distinction that has structured the field ever since.

• Distributive justice concerns how goods (honors, offices, wealth) are allocated across members of a community. Aristotle's principle: equals should be treated equally, unequals unequally — in proportion to relevant merit. The hard question is always: relevant in what respect? The democrat thinks all free citizens are equal in the relevant respect (citizenship); the oligarch thinks property-holders are; the aristocrat thinks the virtuous are.
• Corrective justice concerns the rectification of wrongs between individuals — restoring an equality that has been disturbed by harm or fraud. The judge's role is to take from the wrongdoer the unfair gain and restore it to the victim. Modern tort and criminal law inherit this structure.

Aristotle's framework — the duality of distribution and rectification, the proportional rather than strict-equal conception of fairness, the embedding of justice in the broader virtues — remains the implicit grammar of most legal thinking even where his metaphysics is rejected.

Rawls — Justice as Fairness

John Rawls's A Theory of Justice (1971) is the most important work of 20th-century political philosophy. It single-handedly revived the discipline after a mid-century period in which positivism had pronounced normative theorizing meaningless, and it set the agenda for everything that followed.

Rawls's central device is the original position. Imagine free, rational people choosing the basic structure of their society — but choosing from behind a veil of ignorance that conceals from them their own particular position in that society: their class, race, gender, talents, conception of the good. What principles would such people choose?

Rawls argues they would choose two principles, in lexical priority:

The reasoning: behind the veil, you do not know whether you will end up at the top or bottom of the resulting society. A rational chooser, Rawls argues, would not gamble on landing at the top — she would prefer arrangements that leave the worst-off as well-off as possible. The Difference Principle is risk-aversion at its most general.

Critics from the left argue Rawls is too generous to inequality (any inequality that helps the worst-off is permitted, however large). Critics from the right argue he is too restrictive (the Difference Principle constrains earned reward severely). The continuing argument over Rawls is much of the substance of contemporary political philosophy.

Nozick — Entitlement

Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) is the principal libertarian response to Rawls. Nozick defends an entitlement theory of justice with three components:

• Justice in acquisition — How may one come to own previously unowned things? (Lockean labor-mixing, with constraints.)
• Justice in transfer — How may holdings move between people? (Voluntary exchange and gift.)
• Justice in rectification — What if past acquisitions or transfers were unjust? (Restitution, where possible.)

The implication: a distribution is just if it arose through just steps from a just starting point, regardless of its pattern. Inequality is not in itself a problem. The free choices of millions of consumers buying tickets to see a basketball star produce massive wealth disparities; redistributing this wealth violates the entitlements of those who freely transferred their dollars.

Nozick's most famous argument is the Wilt Chamberlain example: any patterned principle of distribution (Rawls's, an egalitarian's) will be continually disrupted by the ordinary voluntary choices of free people, and maintaining the pattern requires "continuous interference with people's lives." Liberty upsets patterns.

Sen & Nussbaum — The Capabilities Approach

An alternative framework that has reshaped global development thinking. Amartya Sen (Nobel 1998) and Martha Nussbaum argued that the proper "currency" of distributive justice is neither resources (Rawls) nor utility (utilitarians) but capabilities — the real freedoms people have to do and be what they value.

The motivating insight: equal resources can produce vastly unequal capabilities. A wheelchair user given the same income as an able-bodied person is not equally free to move, work, and participate. A woman given the same legal rights as a man in a deeply patriarchal society does not have equal real freedom. Justice should be assessed by what people can actually do and be, not by what bundle of resources they nominally hold.

Nussbaum has gone further than Sen in proposing a list of central capabilities — life, bodily health, bodily integrity, senses-imagination-thought, emotions, practical reason, affiliation, other species, play, control over one's environment — that any decent society must secure to each person at some threshold level. The list is meant to be cross-culturally defensible while leaving room for societies to specify implementation.

The capabilities approach grounds the UN Human Development Index and has shaped much of the policy work of the World Bank, UNDP, and major NGOs. It is the most institutionally consequential post-Rawlsian framework.