Justice

The fair distribution of rights, benefits and burdens - and the argument over what fairness requires.

Theme: Society, politics and power
Tradition: Cross-tradition
Term: δικαιοσύνη · dikaiosunē
Term fixed: c. 380 BC

In plain terms

Everyone agrees justice means giving people what they are due. All the argument is about what determines the due.

Effort, need, merit, contribution, agreement, birth, and simple equality have all been proposed, and they give different answers about the same case. A surgeon who works hard, saves lives, trained for a decade and inherited nothing has a claim under four of those and not under others.

And the frame matters as much as the criterion. Justice can be about the distribution of goods, about the procedure that produced it, about who was recognised as a participant, or about repairing a wrong. A society can be exemplary on one and indefensible on another - which is why arguments about justice are so often two people applying different frames and each finding the other unserious.

As a philosopher would put it

Aristotle's distinction organises the field: distributive justice concerns the allocation of goods according to a criterion of merit, and corrective justice concerns restoring a balance disturbed by a wrong. Later work adds procedural justice, concerning the fairness of the process, and retributive justice, concerning punishment.

Rawls's A Theory of Justice reframed the subject. Principles are those that would be chosen behind a veil of ignorance, by parties who do not know their place, talents or conception of the good: equal basic liberties for all, and social and economic inequalities permitted only where attached to positions open to all and to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged.

Nozick's reply is that justice is historical rather than patterned: a distribution is just if it arose from just acquisition and just transfer, and any pattern can only be maintained by continuous interference. Sen presses a different objection - that the search for perfectly just institutions is less useful than comparing actual arrangements to identify remediable injustice.

Where you meet it

Post-apartheid South Africa had to distribute land, and the choice between frames was immediate. Around 87 per cent of agricultural land had been reserved for white ownership under the 1913 Natives Land Act and subsequent legislation.

The 1994 settlement adopted three programmes: restitution for those dispossessed after 1913, redistribution to broaden ownership, and tenure reform. Restitution is corrective - it repairs identified wrongs to identified claimants. Redistribution is distributive - it targets a pattern of ownership regardless of who was wronged. The two run on different logics and were funded from the same budget.

Progress has been far slower than the targets set, and the reasons are argued about along exactly these lines: whether the constraint was the willing-buyer principle protecting existing holdings, the administrative burden of adjudicating individual claims, or the choice to pursue both frames at once. It is the clearest live instance of a state discovering that distributive and corrective justice are not the same project.

What is actually disputed

Whether justice concerns patterns or histories.

Patterned theories assess a distribution by its shape - how equal it is, how the worst off fare - and hold that a society can be unjust even if every transaction in it was voluntary. Historical theories assess it by how it came about, and Nozick's argument is that any pattern requires continuous interference with people's free exchanges to maintain.

The disagreement is not resolvable by examining cases, because each side takes the other's central intuition as the thing to be explained away.

A further and increasingly prominent dispute concerns scope. Whether justice applies globally, to future generations, and beyond the human is not settled by any of the classical theories, all of which assume a bounded society of contemporaries - and the questions that most urgently need answering, about climate and about migration, sit precisely outside that frame.

Commonly confused with

Equality 1762 Equality is one criterion of distribution among several. Treating unequal cases equally is a standard form of injustice.
fairness in procedure Procedural fairness is one frame. A perfectly fair procedure can produce a distribution nobody could defend.

Defined against

Power Thrasymachus's claim that justice is the interest of the stronger is the challenge the Republic is written to answer, and it has never gone away

Philosophers

Plato Justice as the harmony of a soul and a city
Aristotle Distributive and corrective justice distinguished
John Bordley Rawls The veil of ignorance and the difference principle
Thomas Hobbes Justice as what the sovereign's rules make it
Karl Marx The suspicion that justice talk conceals a mode of production
Al-Farabi The just city, in the Islamic philosophical tradition

Works

Republic The founding treatment
Nicomachean Ethics The distinction that organises the field
A Theory of Justice The modern restatement
Anarchy, State, and Utopia The libertarian reply
Leviathan Justice as dependent on an enforcing power
The German Ideology The materialist critique of justice as ideology

Schools

Old Academy Where the question is first pursued at length
Peripatetic school (Aristotelianism) Where the distinctions are drawn
Classical Utilitarianism Where justice is derived from aggregate welfare
Communitarianism Where it is tied to shared understandings
Objectivism Where entitlement replaces pattern
Classical Marxism Where the whole vocabulary is treated as ideological

Related concepts

Equality 1762 · Rights 1689 · Liberty 1859 · Property 1689 · Legitimacy 1651

The Republic is a book-length attempt to say what justice is, occasioned by the challenge that it is merely the interest of the stronger; Rawls's 1971 restatement is the modern equivalent and the most influential book of twentieth-century political philosophy.