Perspectives on Social Justice

From Hume to Walzer

David Boucher, Paul Kelly

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134749522
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This volume brings together leading theorists to discuss the latest thinking on social justice - a central concern of contemporary politics and political philosophy. Contributors such as Carole Pateman, Raymond Plant and Chris Brown explore:
* the origins of the concept
* the contributions of thinkers such as Hume, Kant and Mill
* issues such as international justice, economic justice, justice and the environment and special rights.
By bringing together the latest applications of theories of justice with a discussion of origins, Perspectives on Social Justice provides a helpful overview for students and specialists alike.

1
Introduction

David Boucher and Paul Kelly

This collection of essays in political theory and politics by an international cast of authors is united by a common theme, that of social justice. Social justice, under its pseudonym of ‘distributive justice’ has enjoyed a significant audience among academic political theorists since John Rawls’ book A Theory of Justice¹ turned much of modern political theory in Britain and the One could be forgiven for thinking that political theory is about how best to United States of America into a discipline focused on issues of distribution. distribute the benefits of social cooperation and how one can justify such claims of justice to others. Such a perception would not be wholly accurate as the discussion of some of the essays in this book will show, but equally it would be forgivable.

Yet whilst political theorists are apt to see the world in terms of a dominant distributive paradigm that can be mined for policy prescriptions or else which must be challenged to allow alternative conceptions of the political to have a voice, the real world of politics at least during the 1970s and 1980s seemed to have given up the idea for dead. It was not uncommon for politicians and those academics who went over to political advocacy, to criticise the ivory tower preoccupations of political philosophers who could theorise about ‘difference principles’, ‘basic income’, ‘equality of resources’, etc., without any concern for how income and wealth (the primary objects of distribution) were produced or who might own them.

During the 1980s, whilst some political philosophers seemed to talk of nothing else, in the real world social justice seemed to have become deeply unpopular. Not only did ‘supply side’ theories, inflation and the claims about the ‘fiscal crisis of the state’ come to dominate discussions of political economy, but prominent politicians claimed ‘there is no such thing as society’. If society does not exist, or is merely reduced to individuals and their families, then there did not seem to be much scope for social justice at all. Whatever else social justice meant—and in terms of substantive prescriptions it meant a whole variety of things—it was normally taken to imply that there are certain things individuals have an entitlement to merely by virtue of their membership of society. These things meant not only the traditional canon of liberal civil rights, but also economic rights to basic welfare provision. Even a theorist as hostile to the idea of social justice as F.A.von Hayek was prepared to countenance a basic economic safety net below which no individual should be allowed to fall.² Few thinkers of any significance were bold enough to tolerate free markets allowing the weakest and most inadequate to starve in the streets.

That even the most vociferous of new-right anti-state theorists rarely contemplated the full rigours of a nineteenth-century Sumnerite ‘social darwinism’³ in which only the fittest were really expected to survive, suggests that the core ideas of social justice really do run deep, whatever may have been the transformation of public political rhetoric. However many obituaries were written for the concept it was never quite laid to rest. As the 1980s gave way to the 1990s and new-right triumphalism started to collapse under the weight of recession, growing unemployment and burgeoning welfare budgets as governments tried to deal with the consequences of large scale economic restructuring, renewed interest in social justice started to be shown in the public rhetoric of opposition and governing parties alike. The welfare systems of the advanced industrial economies came under growing strain, as they continued to respond to public demands and expectations, whilst at the same time the same electorates showed no great propensity to vote for higher taxation to relieve the fiscal burdens of the institutional manifestation of social justice, the welfare state. This situation created practical problems for governing parties, but more severe problems for opposition parties of the centre and left. They could not simply advocate higher taxation to support much needed welfare expenditure without confining themselves to the oblivion of permanent opposition. The appeal to traditional justifications of welfare policies in terms of social justice were not connecting with the popular imagination. The demands of a new world of industrial restructuring and globalisation as well as the continued need for welfare support for the economically dispossessed created a climate in which ideas of social justice came to have a renewed significance, but also created a climate in which traditional ideas of social justice and their policy implications came under review. In 1992 following yet another defeat in a British general election, the Rt Hon. John Smith MP, then leader of the Labour Party, set up an independent Commission on Social Justice. The task of this commission was to rethink the foundations of the welfare state in Britain in as radical a way as Beveridge’s Report of 1945 which gave rise to the British Welfare State. Much of the work of the new commission was to do with an analysis of the conditions of deprivation, poverty, dependency and unemployment and policies to deal with them. Similar inquiries, but with perhaps less grand titles, were undertaken in other countries with similar concerns about the burgeoning cost of welfare along with the need to mitigate the human costs of economic restructuring. But an important consequence to the work of the Commission in the British context was to raise again theoretical issues about the nature and justification of social justice.

The Commission itself played only a minor role directly advancing the discussion of social justice among political theorists, although two reports by the Commission, The Justice Gap,⁴ and Social Justice: Strategies for National Renewal⁵ address in a general way the philosophical underpinnings of the Commission’s policy prescriptions. Nevertheless, the reports themselves and the philosophical bases of their analysis and prescription did provide an added impetus to make the study of social justice once again a central part of public political discourse to which political philosophers and political theorists could contribute.⁶

Our concern in bringing together this collection of essays was not to reflect directly on the current politics of social justice in light of the Commission’s reports, though the essays by Ken Minogue and Lord Plant bear directly on this issue. Instead we set out to provide an overview of positive and critical perspectives on social justice which illustrate the variety of sources from which current thinking on issues of social justice emerges and the plurality of distributive issues which are brought under the heading of social justice. Some of the essays deal directly with particular historical thinkers such as David Hume or John Stuart Mill or groups of thinkers such as the British Idealists who have contributed to the vocabularies of contemporary debates. Other historical essays such as Joe Femia’s on Vilfredo Pareto illustrate the historical resources of some contemporary assaults on the possibility of social justice. Contemporary theorists are dealt with, such as Michael Walzer, and contractarian theorists such as John Rawls, T.M.Scanlon and Brian Barry. Other essays set out to expand the scope of contemporary discussions or to recover neglected vocabularies, such as Carole Pateman’s essay on rights which is influenced by the work of T.H.Marshall.

In substance each of these essays appears to have little in common other than the use of the vocabulary of social or distributive justice. Yet it is precisely this diversity that we deliberately set out to capture in these essays. In writing an adequate history of theories of social justice or study of the concept one has a choice; either one can impose a formal definition of the concept which results in a clearly identifiable narrative, but which will inevitably leave out much of the contested character of the concept; or, one can do what we have done which is to try to reflect adequately the contested character of the concept, its implications and historical sources, but at the cost of acknowledging that many of the debates about social justice are often about very different things. What we have deliberately chosen not to do is to try and show, as we did in our earlier book on the social contract tradition, that there is a relatively coherent tradition of argument at work here.⁷ Also we have chosen not to provide a review of contemporary post-Rawlsian debates on distributive justice, though an overview of contemporary work on post-Rawlsian theories of distributive justice forms a later essay. Such debates are important and still, as mentioned earlier, exercise a dominant position in contemporary political theory—no adequate political theory text on the issue of social justice could neglect such debates—but equally we deliberately set out to show that whatever dominance Rawls type theorising still exercises there is yet more to the political theory of social justice. Furthermore, in light of a renewed public interest in the issue of social justice, coupled with a widespread recognition that traditional arguments and defences of social justice are no longer adequate or sufficient to cope with the full range of contemporary problems and expectations, it was all the more important that we should not confine our study merely to a review of contractarian or Kantian justifications of distributive or social justice.

In the remainder of this introductory chapter we have not set out to identify any unifying narrative or common set of themes. Instead we have confined our efforts to providing an overview of each of the subsequent chapters. This is not to say that there are no common themes and arguments running through the different essays. There certainly are themes that emerge in a number of them. However, our concern was to emphasise the variety rather than the uniformity of debates which fall under the heading of social justice.

SOCIAL JUSTICE: FROM HUME TO WALZER—AN OVERVIEW

In republishing David Gauthier’s important essay on David Hume as a contractarian, our intention was to provide an account of Hume as a contributory source for contemporary theorising about social or distributive justice, and this is precisely what Gauthier provides. Ostensibly Gauthier is concerned with arguing that Hume despite being one of contractarianism’s most famous critics was also at the same time a consistent contractarian theorist. In making this interpretative case Gauthier provides a useful distinction between the varieties of contractarianism, from ‘original’ contract theories of the origin of government— which Gauthier argues is Hume’s real target— to hypothetical mutual advantage theories which he argues Hume used in his defence of private property and rules of justice.

It is this latter form of contractarianism and Hume’s use of it to justify private property and justice which makes Gauthier’s essay important for this collection. For the account of property and justice that Gauthier finds in Hume is akin to the mutual advantage theory which he develops in more detail in his own Morals by Agreement⁸ which has become the main rival to impartialist contractarian defences of justice such as those advanced by John Rawls in A Theory of Justice and Brian Barry in Justice as Impartiality⁹ and to utilitarian defences such as those offered by Bentham and John Stuart Mill (see Riley’s chapter).

Unlike utilitarian theories, with which Hume’s account of justice is often confused, Gauthier argues that for Hume the obligations of justice are not to be understood in terms of an interest in performing an act of justice. This would reduce all obligations of justice to the status of any obligation under act utilitarianism. However, Hume does not want to deny the connection between justice and interest for he wants a wholly naturalistic explanation of moral obligations such as those of justice. The solution is provided, for Gauthier, by a form of hypothetical contract argument which grounds the conventions and rules of justice in the mutual advantage of contributors and then moves to another level of explanation which shows that the obligatoriness of justice is based on an interest in maintaining the conventions which require specific acts rather than an interest in the specific act itself. Thus Hume does not have to show as do act utilitarians that there is always a natural convergence between individual and general interest to preclude defecting from the general interest. Hume can concede that in a particular case there may be grounds for saying the performance of the act is not in the person’s interest, without conceding that the person ceases to be under an obligation.

A further crucial implication of Gauthier’s argument is that it shows that a Humean conception of justice is one that confines the remit of social justice to maintenance of stable expectations in the distribution of property, and does not sanction the redistribution of property and income. As Gauthier was to show in his development of the idea in Morals by Agreement, a mutual advantage contract assumes that the only beneficiaries of justice are those who contribute to the production of the benefits of social cooperation. Those who are mere beneficiaries do not have a claim of justice on contributors because they do not contribute to that which the conventions of justice regulates. Thus Gauthier uses Hume to challenge the presumed egalitarian outcome of principles of distributive justice, and to support a different perspective on justice from that derived from the idea of impartiality.

Utilitarianism has a peculiar status among the sources of contemporary debates about social justice. Utilitarianism contributes to the growth of the idea of social justice through the social reforms advocated by historical utilitarians such as Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill and their followers, and through the growth of modern welfare economics that in part developed from the utilitarian tradition. However, among contemporary political theorists and philosophers, at least since Rawls’ A Theory of Justice, utilitarianism has been seen as one of the problems that theories of distributive justice are designed to deal with. For Rawls and his followers, utilitarians are unable to give an adequate account of justice because they apply a decision rule which denies the significance of the separateness of persons, and because they cannot provide a principled constraint on sacrificing the good of some to the majority’s welfare. Utilitarianism violates what Rex Martin in his paper identifies as the root idea of economic justice ‘that the arrangement of economic institutions requires, if it is to be just, that all contributors benefit or, at least, that none are to be left worse off’. It does this because it has no reason to deny making some social group economically worse off if the advantage to others is sufficient to outweigh that group’s loss of utility.

Whilst some utilitarians are happy to accept this conclusion, arguing that Rawls type objections to utilitarianism apply equally to his ‘original position’ or else that they trade on unjustifiable intuitions, many other utilitarians have attempted to rebut these charges and show how utilitarianism can give rise to basic rights and justice. Similarly historians of utilitarianism¹⁰ have argued that not only were historical utilitarians acutely aware of these charges but answered them. Jonathan Riley’s essay on Mill, sets out to show that John Stuart Mill had not only recognised the problem of Rawls type criticisms, but had an answer for them based on his liberal variant of optimal rule utilitarianism. Riley’s purpose, however, is not merely to defend the reputation of utilitarianism’s greatest champion of justice and rights, but also show that the Millian strategy can form the basis of a viable utilitarian theory of justice, which is both superior to other variants of rule utilitarianism, such as those offered by John Harsanyi and Richard Brandt, but which is also a superior defence of a liberal theory of justice than Rawlsian contractarianism.

Riley argues that Mill offers a version of optimal rule utilitarianism, whereby actions are judged in terms of their conformity to an ideal code of rules. However, Mill’s justification of optimal rule utilitarianism avoids the standard charge that rule utilitarianism collapses into act utilitarianism or else it ceases to be utilitarian on the grounds that the rules are not justified simply because of weaknesses of intellect and emotion, but because of the positive expectation effects of a system of rights and duties and the significance of these for individual freedom and character. For Mill the basic rights of liberal utilitarianism are not merely a response to weakness of motivation and character that would be lacking in a world of act utilitarian saints. What is distinctive about Mill’s theory according to Riley, is that he defends a liberal constraint on the application of first order impartiality which is as robust as that which contemporary contractarian theories of distributive justice provide.

Riley’s paper is also of interest for the way in which he defends the superiority of his reading of Mill’s theory of justice to the theories of fellow rule utilitarians such as Harsanyi and Brandt as well as non-utilitarians such as Rawls. In this way his chapter is not concerned merely with the recovery of Mill’s theory but with a direct contribution to debates about distributive justice.

Themes from Plato’s seminal discussion of Justice are pursued and represented in this volume by Femia on Pareto and Boucher on the British Idealists. Thrasymachus’s infamous equation of Justice with expediency and what serves the interests of the powerful is echoed in Pareto’s contemptuous dismissal of the very idea of social justice. The starting point of Femia’s exploration of Pareto’s views is Justinian’s restatement of Aristotle’s definition of justice: that everyone should be rendered his due. This is another way of saying that justice is a matter of treating everyone equally, where equality is correlative with an equal entitlement to what is one’s due. There is, of course, widespread agreement that justice certainly does have something to do with desert. David Miller, for example, identifie...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• CONTRIBUTORS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• 1. INTRODUCTION
• 2. DAVID HUME, CONTRACTARIAN
• 3. MILL ON JUSTICE
• 4. PARETO AND THE CRITIQUE OF JUSTICE
• 5. BRITISH IDEALISM AND THE JUST SOCIETY
• 6. INTERNATIONAL SOCIAL JUSTICE
• 7. IS ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE A MISNOMER?
• 8. DEMOCRACY, RIGHTS AND DISTRIBUTIVE ECONOMIC JUSTICE
• 9. JUSTICE IN THE COMMUNITY: WALZER ON PLURALISM, EQUALITY AND DEMOCRACY
• 10. CONTRACTARIAN SOCIAL JUSTICE: AN OVERVIEW OF SOME CONTEMPORARY DEBATES
• 11. RACIAL EQUALITY: COLOUR, CULTURE AND JUSTICE
• 12. DEMOCRACY, FREEDOM AND SPECIAL RIGHTS
• 13. BEYOND SOCIAL JUSTICE AND SOCIAL DEMOCRACY: POSITIVE FREEDOM AND CULTURAL RIGHTS
• 14. SOCIAL JUSTICE IN THEORY AND PRACTICE
• 15. WHY SOCIAL JUSTICE?