Justice from Plato to Rawls

Justice from Plato to Rawls

(Source: Ethics Matter, University of San Diego)

What is justice? This is a long-debated question by philosophers and jurists and political leaders, and our consideration of justice will begin with a brief consideration of one of the earliest philosophical texts about justice: Plato’s Republic. After that we will look at one of the most recent theories of justice, but one that is extraordinarily powerful: John Rawls’ account in A Theory of Justice (1972).

A. Plato’s Account of Justice

Plato’s Republic is one of the classics of Western philosophy, and it constitutes a long meditation on the nature of justice. Over the course of its ten books, it describes the ideal state, and that itself is the embodiment of justice. For Plato, justice is an unavoidably social and political concept, so a meditation on the nature of justice naturally becomes a meditation on the ideal society and state.

The Athenian Conception of Justice: Justice as Honesty in Word and Deed

In Book One of The Republic, we see Plato survey several different and conflicting conceptions of justice. It is helpful to look at these, because they provide a set of models for everyday conceptions of justice in our own times. The conversation begins with Cephalus, an elder statesman in Athens and widely recognized as a just man, talking with Socrates, who has asked him what the greatest benefit of his wealth has been. Cephalus replies that, as he gets older, he thinks more about what will happen after death and gains hope from the knowledge that he has lived in justice and piety. This prompts Socrates to ask Cephalus what justice is, Cephalus replies that justice comes down to being truthful and paying your debts.

As will occur throughout The Republic, Socrates poses objections to the definition of justice. Imagine, Socrates says, that someone has stored his weapons with you. Later, the friend comes back “not in his right mind” and asks you to return the weapons to him. No one would fault us, Socrates says, from refusing to give the weapons back. But if this is so, “then speaking the truth and paying your debts is not a correct definition of justice.”

The Conventional View of Justice: Helping Friends and Harming Enemies

Cephalus gives up on defining justice, and turns the conversation over to Polemarchus, his son. Polemarchus states the conventional view of justice, namely, that justice consists in helping your friends and harming your enemies. In dealing with your enemies, your should return evil for evil, according to Polemarchus. This definition, Socrates suggests, might be useful in war, but it offers us little guidance in times of peace. Socrates then proceeds to twist Polemarchus’ ideas around to the point that Polemarchus seems to be saying that the just person is best at being unjust.

The Cynical View of Justice: Might Makes Right

The next definition of justice considered by Socrates is advanced by Thrasymachus, who maintains that “justice is nothing else than the interest of the stronger.” The only thing that makes any difference, this view of justice asserts, is power, and justice is whatever the powerful declare it to be.

There is obviously a certain amount of realism in this view: justice is rarely achieved without the support of the power structure, but it is only the cynic who agrees with Thrasymachus that justice is only the interest of the stronger. If that were the case, there never would be justification for criticizing the state for acting unjustly.

Plato’s View of Justice

It would be simple if Socrates then went on to tell us what justice really is, but this is not the way Socrates (and Plato) taught. Rather, we have to look at the entirety of The Republic to see what Plato really meant by justice, and even that is the source of much disagreement among scholars. Here I will offer simply one view of what Plato may have meant by justice.

Justice in The Republic is harmony, both internal and external. Internal harmony is a proper balance in the soul, and external harmony manifests itself in the state. The virtuous individual possesses inner harmony, a balance among the faculties of the soul. In order to live a good life, the virtuous individual must live in a just society. Thus inner and outer justice need one another: without just individuals, a just society is impossible; without a just society, the life of the just individual may not be a happy one.

B. Distributive Justice: John Rawls

John Rawls has had a profound impact on contemporary moral and political philosophy. His most important work, A Theory of Justice, was first published in 1971. After its publication, it established the conceptual landscape within which discussions of justice were to occur, at least in the English-speaking literature. You could agree with Rawls or you could disagree with him, but you couldn’t ignore him.

Rawls’ Moral Concerns

Rawls was acutely aware of the extent to which that luck was not deserved—it was simply luck. Throughout his work, Rawls remains highly sensitive to this issue of luck, and his goal is to create a society in which luck plays a minimal role in the rules that govern that society. Out of this comes Rawls’ deep egalitarianism, his desire to see everyone treated as fairly as possible. A Theory of Justice provides an account of what is involved in such fair treatment.

The Original Position: A Thought Experiment

Imagine you are put in the following situation. You are one of a group of people who have been assigned the task of devising the basic rules that will govern society and the interactions of individuals in society. Your job is to work with the other people in the group to devise this set of principles. Furthermore, you are representing someone else in doing this, as are all the other delegates. You are to act rationally, and all of you are to act in the best interests of the people you represent. There is just one catch: you are behind what Rawls calls the “veil of ignorance.”

The Social Contract

Up until Rawls introduces the notion of the veil of ignorance, his account forms a standard hypothetical contractarian approach, that is, he sees the foundation of morality in some kind of social contract, usually implicit rather than an actual contract agreed upon at some historical time. Perhaps the most well-known representative of this approach to social theory was Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose book The Social Contract (1762) continues to be studied today.

The Veil of Ignorance

Rawls’ distinctive addition to the concept of the social contract was to ask the participants to imagine that they do not know any particulars about the person each of them was to represent. Thus, as a representative in the original position, I would be committed to acting rationally on behalf of the person I represent and to seeking to devised the best possible rules for that position. But since I am behind the veil of ignorance, I do not know anything in particular about the person I am representing. Is the person male or female, young or old, rich or poor. In what areas is the person talented: the arts, science, sports, human relations? In what country does the person live?

It is easy to see the Kantian dimension present in this notion of the veil of ignorance. Kant asks us to set aside our moral individuality and ask what any rational agent ought to do in a given situation. (This is the force of Kant’s imperative that we ought to be able to will the maxim of our actions for all rational beings.) By denying us knowledge of the specifics of our situation, and by asking us to represent in a rational and prudential way the best interests of that person concealed behind the veil of ignorance, Rawls forces us into a kind of neutrality that has a clearly Kantian flavor. Although we are self-interested in this context, we don’t have any specific knowledge of the particular self that would allow us to be partisan in standard ways. Deliberation in the original position behind the veil of ignorance should insure that no one’s interests are short-changed.

We can also see the way in which Rawls’ veil of ignorance helps to even out some of the effects, both positive and negative, of mere luck. We do not know whether or not we have been lucky enough to be very intelligent, to be very athletic, to be very gregarious, to be very rich, to be part of the ruling elite. The veil of ignorance flattens out some of those quirks of fate, and in so doing provides a more level playing field for the moral life.

Rawls’ Principles

Deliberating behind the veil of ignorance in the original position, what principles will we adopt for our society according to Rawls? He maintains that we would reach agreement on two basic principles, one regarding basic rights and liberties and the other regarding the distribution of social and economic inequalities.

Basic Rights. In A Theory of Justice, Rawls maintains that “Each person has an equal claim to a fully adequate scheme of equal basic rights and liberties, which scheme is compatible with the same scheme for all; and in this scheme the equal political liberties, and only those liberties, are to be guaranteed their fair value.”

The Difference Principle. “Social and economic inequalities are to satisfy two conditions:

(a) they are to be attached to positions and offices open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity; and

(b) they are to be to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged members of society

These two principles form the core of Rawls’ position, and they can both be seen as principles of distributive justice. The first principle, the basic rights principle, establishes how we should distribute liberties. Part (a) of the difference principle establishes how we should distribute opportunities. These two principles are indexical, that is, if there is a conflict, principle 1 overrides principle 2, and (a) overrides (b). Let’s look at some examples to see what Rawls means by these principles.

Consider the Difference Principle, part (a). (This example will be more concrete than Rawls would give, but it illustrates the point quite well.) We have laws regulating driving regarding speeding, stop lights, etc. If two people were speeding, and the police let one go because the speeder was the child of the chief of police, we would consider that unjust. If, however, the police did not stop a speeding ambulance because it was rushing someone to the hospital, that would not offend our Rawlsian sense of justice. The exception would be based on the position or office (ambulance driver), which is open to all, whereas this is not the case with the child of the chief of police.

The Difference Principle, part (b) might be used to justify attempts to level the playing field after inequalities due to racial discrimination. We might, for example, treat people differently because they had been severely deprived due to racial bigotry. Such differential treatment might involve additional tutoring, more active recruitment, and the like. The underlying justification of this, In Rawls’ eyes, is that these are the least advantaged members of society and differential treatment is justified in order to narrow the gap between the least advantaged and the majority of society.

On the other hand, this principle would not justify large tax exemptions for the wealthy, precisely because this would not benefit the least advantaged but rather the most advantaged.

C. Criminal Justice

We have been examining competing approaches to justice in the preceding sections, but there is another issue of justice that those discussions often neglect: the justice that we seek when someone has broken the law, has committed a crime.

Retributive Justice

The dominant justification of punishment in the United States appears to be the appeal to retributive justice. At its core, the notion of retributive justice usually depends on some version of the lex talionis, the law of “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.” This is retributive justice: if someone has hurt me, that person will be hurt in return in the same way. Often, this notion of retributive justice is used to justify the death penalty: an eye for an eye, a death for a death.

Despite the fact that the lex talionis has some initial plausibility in a small range of cases, we in fact can see that there are many cases where this literal interpretation of the lex talionis makes no sense at all. How, for example, are we to punish those who hijack airplanes? We can’t very well hijack their planes, since they do not have any. What about arsonists? Do we set their homes on fire? Or rapists? Do we rape them in return? Or burglars? Do we steal their money and possessions when they are asleep?

While some would probably advocate those extreme responses, most of us would admit that the literal interpretation of the lex talionis is insufficient for two reasons. First, there are many types of crimes for which it makes no sense that we would try to do the same thing to the perpetrator. The more plausible interpretation of this principle is a metaphorical one that says something like this: the more serious the crime, the more serious the punishment.

But even this will not suffice. We need to recognize that, in the most serious of cases, we may restrain ourselves from extreme punishment because the act of punishing diminishes us. Take rape as an example. To rape a rapist as punishment would be to demean ourselves, the punishers. So, too, we do not torture the sadistic murderer, even though on the basis of some principle of proportionally we believe the murderer deserves to suffer as much as his victims. Again, we restrain ourselves because we would be debasing ourselves to carry out the punishment.

Interestingly, recognizing these two limitations on the lex talionis helps us to find a middle ground in regard to the death penalty. Proponents of the death penalty, if one accepts this principle, are justified in claiming that certain criminals have done such horrendous things that they deserve to die. Opponents of the death penalty can admit this, while at the same time arguing that, even if some criminals deserve to die, we do not deserve to kill them. The issue is the effect of the punishment on the punishers.

Those who hold a strictly retributivist account of justice are open to some objections. How should we treat the person who has done something horrible in his youth, subsequently led an exemplary life, and then in old age is apprehended for that crime committed long ago? Retributivists are committed to saying that the magnitude of the crime remains the same, whether committed yesterday or fifty years ago. Other, more forward-looking accounts of punishment would be less likely to punish to the full measure of the law.

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