Introduction
Few observers would object to the observation that humanity is facing a growing set of problems that is affecting all life on this planet. Near the top of these problems is the idea that contemporary globalization has had an asymmetric distributional impact on the lives of people everywhere. Rather than leveling the “haves” vs. “have-nots” playing field, globalization and the technological advances that accompanied it have deepened the divide. They have exacerbated and intensified income and wealth inequalities. A few have accumulated unprecedented wealth and power while most of humanity have been left behind over the last fifty years with reduced hope for a better future. Numerous academics have been alerting the world to what has been going on before our eyes but to no avail. Former US President Obama’s declaration that inequality has become “the defining issue of our time” is not an exaggeration. Nor is there any hope of ways and means to reverse course anytime soon. Evidence, supported by empirical research, suggests that, if anything, the problem of inequality is expected to intensify. One such evidence was provided by Thomas Piketty in his popular book (2014). 1 Piketty is not very optimistic that the challenge of inequality can be addressed within the present configuration of the “free market” capitalism, given the prevailing political dominance of capital.
There is little disagreement that a high degree of economic inequality is detrimental to the proper functioning of a society. And more often than not, political inequality accompanies economic inequality. Significant inequality that concentrates economic resources in the hands of a few affords them vastly disproportionate political power. This, in turn, provides an economically powerful means to change, implicitly or explicitly, established rules leading to the emergence of two sets of rules and laws: one for the powerful and one for everyone else. The powerful develop the attitude that laws that apply for others are not relevant for them. As a result, the rest of society develops a sense of helplessness that comes from being overwhelmed by the political and economic power of the rich. 2
Concurrent with the pain of growing poverty, high levels of inequality erode the sense of community and strengthen an increasing sense of injustice. When massive inequality 3 and poverty are perceived as both the precedent and antecedent of injustice, demand for justice becomes a battle cry for change. While extreme inequality is generally considered as unjust, few would argue that justice and equality are one and the same or that a just society is one in which all are economically equal. 4 Evidently, existence of some degree of inequality need not be considered as evidence of injustice so long as the Jeffersonian “palpable truth” is prevalent and acknowledged in society. To Thomas Jefferson, “truth” meant “that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.” 5 The implication here, and supported by the words of moral philosophers over two centuries ago, is that all human beings are equal in value and worthy of dignity, respect, and equal protection by society. The clear perception is that this is not the case in most societies in the world today.
If it is accepted that a large and growing income and wealth inequality is inherently unjust, then restoring justice becomes an imperative lest an exacerbated sense of injustice, unleashes destructive forces that threaten the very fabric of societies. 6 Extreme inequality and growing poverty are in 2018 the most serious challenges for justice to prevail. There are, however, many conceptions of justice, including inter alia: justice as virtue of individuals, as virtue of social institutions, as norms, as entitlement, as responsibility, as desert, as fairness, as reciprocity, as benevolence, as agape love, as retribution, as abiding by the law of the society, as social, as greatest happiness (utility), as political and economic equality, and as freedom. 7 The question then arises as which conception of justice should be used not only as the benchmark against which the degree and intensity of injustice should be measured but also for selecting and designing the policies to alleviate injustice.
The daunting challenge here is the variety of conceptions and principles of justice. This has led some to liken justice to the proverbial elephant in a roomful of blind people attempting to describe it. Chaim Perelman, echoing Hume, says that justice is simply a confused concept. 8 Moreover, some have argued that recent theorizing about justice exacerbates the emergence of a clear understanding of justice or its conception as a unified idea. This has re-enforced the confused state of knowledge about justice even further. 9 Robert Solomon complained that the discussions of justice have become “so specialized and so academic and so utterly unbearable that it has become just another intellectual puzzle, a conceptual Gordian knot waiting its academic Alexander.” 10 While the wide variation of competing ideas of justice makes the emergence of a consensus on what constitutes justice challenging, Michael Waltzer suggests that “justice is a human construct, and it is doubtful that it can be made in only one way.” 11
Some have argued 12 that there is no urgent need to focus on the nature and conception of justice. Instead the focus should be on doing whatever possible to remove injustice in the society. Immanuel Kant 13 maintained that justice “is just the principle of equality, by which the pointer of scale of justice is made to incline no more to the one side than the other.” 14 This kind of argument begs the question of by what principle or conception should the “scale of justice” be established? Within the rubric of the law, Kant’s answer is: by treating everyone equally. This is simple enough, but what of overall justice in society? Without a concrete conception of non-legal justice (social, political, and economic), the answer becomes complex.
At the beginning of their book, What is Justice, Solomon and Murphy 15 list a large number of questions regarding issues and problems that any conception of justice would have to address. Some of these questions are abstract such as, what is a good society? What is a legitimate government? What sort of creatures are humans supposed to be? What do humans owe one another and why? But there are also questions regarding day-to-day problems like income inequality, fairness of social arrangements, distribution and redistribution of income and wealth, gender inequality in the workplace and inheritance. These and other questions while challenging in themselves make the “task of bridging the abyss between the abstract and the eminently practical” very difficult. They argue that while no theory of justice can be permanently sustained at highly abstract philosophical level without being applicable to everyday problems, no solution to everyday problems “can long sustain itself without reaching up to the heights of philosophy, struggling as Socrates struggled to come to grips with the definition of justice, with its essential nature and justification.” 16
In his book, 17 Alasdair Macintyre argued that Western societies have lost their teleological worldview that anchored their sense of morality, virtue, and justice. The solution out of the justice conundrum, he suggested, is a return to the Aristotelian tradition (in its Thomist version according to the Third Edition of his book). Aristotle maintained that among all creatures only humans had perception of good and bad as well as justice and injustice. An intrinsic sense of justice is inherent in the nature of humans. It is this intrinsic sense that provides the basis upon which humans form their communities. He further held that justice is the virtue of all virtues and that the prevalence of injustice makes clear the meaning of justice.
The idea that a sense of justice is inherent in the nature of humans is supported by evidence that justice dates back to the very beginning of human history. The idea is at the same time “so ancient that everything has been said about it and it is so modern that it constitutes an ever-changing context of contemporary society.” 18 Justice, therefore, is considered universal and a species-wide concern. 19 In an increasingly interdependent world, demand for justice takes on a universal dimension. The search for a just universal order requires a global outlook, a perspective rooted in deeper and more global understanding of the conception of justice. Much of the modern ideas on justice have their source in the writings and thoughts of European or American thinkers for whom the axis of orientation has been early European thinkers. A multi-civilizational world view of a search for a plural conception of justice would need to decenter thinking about justice “away from a Eurocentric and/or Christocentric axis,” 20 to search for a vision of justice that is plural and transcends focus entirely either on justice as a virtue of individual or a virtue of institutions or as a stand-alone principle or criterion of justice, without rejecting these conceptions. Our contention is that such a conception is one that unifies all other ideas into a cohesive conception of justice in which individuals, institutions, and the governance of society behave so that society as a whole is justly ordered. In other words, such a unified vision would have to conceive of justice as a system in which all of its parts behave justly.
Most Western ideas about justice have focused on justice as the virtue of individual, 21 only lately some, such as Rawls, have considered justice as the virtue of a society’s distributional institutions. Alternatively, scholars expressed justice as principle or criterion. Exceptions are Plato and the Platonic Islamic scholars and philosophers who thought of a just society as an enlightened collectivity ruled by philosopher-kings. But here, the focus was on the person of the leader not on the structure of the governance of the society that did not depend on individuals. Upon historical review, we find only two systems of thought that, explicitly or implicitly, conceived of justice as a system. The first is that of conception of justice during the period referred to the Pre-Axial age, going back to the dawn of human civilization down to 800 BCE. It begins with Zarathustra 22 whose system of thought includes a requirement that a just social system be anchored on just governance, and Islam that situates a just system explicitly around the axis of just governance as the anchor of the system. 23
Summary of the Conception of Justice in Islam
While Western thinking on distributive justice has evolved from earliest history to the present, the Islamic conception of a just society has not changed with time because Muslims believ...