6.1 Introduction
Justice is of central importance in political practice and theory — invoked in defending or opposing laws, public policies, administrative decisions, civil disobedience, and satyagraha campaigns. The civil rights, civil liberties, dalit, feminist, and environmental movements are all essentially movements for justice.
Justice is widely regarded as the first virtue of social institutions — the words of John Rawls (A Theory of Justice, 1971). The Preamble of the Indian Constitution commits the Democratic Republic of India to securing “Justice, social, economic and political” — notably listing justice above liberty, equality, and fraternity.
Rawls’s book inaugurated what has been rightly called “a golden age in theorising about justice.” Tom Campbell notes that justice is today “the central and commanding concept of current mainstream normative political philosophy.” B.N. Ray (John Rawls and the Agenda of Social Justice) observes that Rawls’s book has renewed both scholarly and popular interest in justice.
Despite widespread agreement on justice as a central moral-political value, there is deep disagreement on its meaning and scope — among liberal-utilitarian, liberal-egalitarian (Rawlsian), libertarian, communitarian, Marxist, and feminist theorists.
6.2 The Idea of Justice
Etymology: from the Latin jungere (to bind, to tie together) and jus (a bond or tie). As a bonding idea, justice organises people into a right or fair order by distributing to each person their due share of rights and duties, rewards and punishments.
Roman Emperor Justinian’s precepts (derived from Aristotle):
- Alterum non laedere — not to harm or injure others.
- Suum cuique tribuere — to allocate to each what is due to them.
Aristotle defined justice as the treating of equals equally and of unequals unequally in proportion to their inequalities. He distinguished three types: distributive justice, corrective justice, and commutative justice (equivalence in exchange of different kinds of goods).
Justice is inter-linked with liberty, equality, and fraternity. What makes a society just is its right or fair ordering of human relations by giving each person their due rights, duties, rewards, and punishments. Traditionally, justice was taken as a balancing or reconciling principle — represented by the figure of personified justice holding a balance — that reconciles the principles of liberty, equality, cooperation, etc. with reference to some ultimate value (e.g., greatest happiness of the greatest number, or freedom and equality of all members of society).
6.2.1 Procedural Justice and Substantive Justice
- Procedural justice: fairness or impartiality of the processes and procedures through which a law, policy, or decision is arrived at and applied. Traditionally based on formal equality of persons as human beings or subjects of the rule of law, irrespective of gender, religion, race, caste, or wealth. Often associated with rights-based justice.
- Substantive justice: fairness of the content or outcome of laws, policies, and decisions. Often associated with needs-based justice.
Rawls claims his is a theory of “pure procedural justice” — the justice of his distributive principles is founded on justice-as-fairness of the procedure through which they were arrived at, with no independent or antecedent criteria of fairness. His libertarian critic Robert Nozick disputes this, arguing Rawls’s theory is actually a set of principles of “end-state” or “patterned” justice.
6.2.2 Needs, Rights and Deserts
Needs-based justice:
- Most famous formulation: Marx’s principle — “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”
- Socialists generally subscribe to needs-based egalitarian justice; basic material needs are seen as objective and universal, unlike wants or preferences which are culture- or market-related.
- Abraham Maslow: hierarchy of human needs — from basic needs (air, water, food, shelter) to safety, love, self-esteem, and self-realisation.
- Calls for egalitarian distribution of resources within and across countries.
Rights-based justice:
- Classical liberalism (Locke, Hume): state’s main function is to protect the negative liberty rights of individuals.
- Welfare-state liberals: stress positive freedom or welfare rights.
- Present-day libertarians (e.g., Nozick): espouse an entitlement-centred, non-egalitarian conception of social justice.
Deserts-based justice (occasionally called “natural justice”):
- A tough, non-egalitarian version of rights-based justice.
- Emphasises the natural deserts or innate worth of individuals as constituting a God-given, natural, unalterable order.
- Edmund Burke and Herbert Spencer upheld these ideas. Spencer: each individual should get “the benefits and the evils of his own nature and consequent conduct.”
- These ideas provide a conservative, social-Darwinian defence of free-market capitalism.
6.3 Rawls’s Liberal-Egalitarian Principles of Social Justice
6.3.1 Critique of Utilitarianism
Rawls’s principles of social justice are a corrective to the liberal-utilitarian principle of “the greatest happiness of the greatest number.”
- Rawls recognises that liberal utilitarianism was a progressive, welfare-oriented departure from classical liberalism’s preoccupation with individualistic rights.
- However, utilitarianism is morally flawed: it justifies sacrificing the good of some individuals for the happiness of the greatest number. Its criterion of justice is the aggregate sum of utility or happiness — not the well-being of each member of society.
- Rawls draws inspiration from Immanuel Kant’s moral idea of the freedom and equality of every human being — that every person is to be treated as an end in themselves, not as a means to the ends of others. Utilitarianism violates this principle; Rawls reinstates it.
6.3.2 Rawls’s Liberal-Egalitarian Principles of Justice
Rawls describes a stable, reasonably well-off society as “a cooperative venture for mutual advantage” — with both cooperation and conflict over the distribution of burdens and benefits. The purpose of social justice principles is to ensure this distribution is fair to all. The basic institutions of society should ensure the continuous distribution of “social primary goods” — rights and liberties, powers and opportunities, and income and wealth — in a just manner.
Rawls’s Two Principles of Justice:
Principle 1 — Equal Basic Liberties: Each person has the same indefeasible claim to a fully adequate scheme of equal basic liberties, compatible with the same scheme for all.
Principle 2 (two parts):
- (2-i) Fair Equality of Opportunity: social and economic inequalities are to be attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity.
- (2-ii) The Difference Principle: social and economic inequalities are to be to the greatest benefit of the least-advantaged members of society.
These principles are listed in lexical priority — the first principle must be fully satisfied before the next is applied. Liberty can be restricted only for the sake of liberty, not for income or wealth.
Basic liberties include: freedom of conscience, freedom of thought, freedom of the person, right to hold personal property, freedom from arbitrary arrest and detention (rule of law), freedom of speech and assembly, and political freedoms.
These basic rights and liberties enable the exercise of two highest-order moral powers:
- The capacity to understand, apply, and act according to principles of justice.
- The capacity to form, revise, and pursue conceptions of the good.
Every member of a just society must be viewed as having these two moral capacities — making them free and equal citizens. Moral equality of citizens means they each have “a right to equal respect and consideration in determining the principles by which the basic arrangements of their society are to be regulated.”
On inequalities: Rawls opposes unequal distribution of basic liberties but accepts that some inequalities in income and wealth are inevitable and perhaps not undesirable. Excessive equality would destroy economic incentives for creativity and productivity — harmful to both rich and poor. Inequalities that serve as incentives for the talented are not unjust if their greater productivity is integrated into an institutional arrangement for distribution benefiting all, especially the least advantaged.
The Difference Principle does not replace inequality with equality — it transforms unfair inequalities into just ones by maximising the benefits of the least advantaged. Inequalities that benefit the better-off but not the least advantaged are unjust.
General conception of justice (from which the two principles are derived): “All social primary goods — liberty and opportunity, income and wealth and the bases of self-respect — are to be distributed equally, unless an unequal distribution of any or all of these goods is to the advantage of the least favoured.”
6.3.3 The Social Contract Procedure
Rawls defends his principles through a social contract method that respects the Kantian idea of the freedom and equality of all persons. His social contract is hypothetical, not historical — a hypothetical assembly or “original position” of “heads of families” who assemble before society is formed to agree on general principles of distributive justice.
To ensure impartiality and fairness, Rawls postulates a “veil of ignorance” — contractors do not know their attributes, class, social status, or their own conceptions of the good. They do know the general circumstances of justice (limited human benevolence, conflict of interests over limited social primary goods). They also know that in actual society, they might end up as the least advantaged.
Given this uncertainty, it is rational for each contractor to follow the “maximin rule” — in an uncertain situation, choose so as to maximise one’s minimum prospects. This rational choice under uncertainty leads all contractors to agree on Rawls’s two principles, since those principles give the best deal to the least advantaged.
6.3.4 The Basic Structure of Society
The primary subject of justice is the basic structure of society. Rawls’s principles justify and are justified by liberal democracy, a regulated market economy, and the liberal-egalitarian welfare state.
For translating the Difference Principle into practice, Rawls proposes a government with four branches:
- Allocation branch — keeps the price system workably competitive; prevents unreasonable market power.
- Stabilisation branch — brings about reasonably full employment; maintains efficiency of the market economy (jointly with the allocation branch).
- Transfer branch — attends to claims of need and an appropriate standard of life.
- Distribution branch — preserves justice in distributive shares through taxation and adjustments in property rights.
6.4 Criticisms of Rawls’s Liberal-Egalitarian Conception of Justice
6.4.1 The Libertarian Critique
Robert Nozick (Anarchy, State and Utopia, 1974) — Rawls’s late colleague and leading libertarian critic.
Nozick distinguishes between:
- End-state/patterning conceptions of justice: call for social reconstruction or patterning by the state in the name of some end-goal — Nozick classifies Rawls’s theory as this type, arguing it undermines individual liberty rights and is therefore unfair.
- Historical/entitlement-based conceptions: justice or injustice lies in the history of acquisition of titles to property holdings.
According to Nozick, the individual has absolute liberty rights — including the right to own property and exchange it in the market — regardless of the end-state or pattern of distribution this produces. His entitlement theory includes a principle of rectificatory justice to correct past injustices in the acquisition or transfer of property.
Assessment: Nozick’s libertarian conception is a defence of free-market capitalism. While eloquent on protecting individual rights from state interference, it is silent on how very rich people or corporations undermine individual freedom and equality.
6.4.2 Some Marxist Criticisms
Marxists criticise liberal egalitarians for their preoccupation with just or fair distributions within the capitalist system, failing to address its underlying exploitative and alienating inequalities between capitalists and workers.
The ideal communist society — to be achieved through the destruction of private ownership of the means of production — would be one with no scarcity, no limits to human benevolence, and no state. Since Rawls’s theory is premised on scarcity and limited benevolence as the “circumstances of justice,” their presumed absence in communist society makes all distributive principles irrelevant. Communism would instead function on: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”
The collapse of Soviet communism and the advance of liberalisation have cast doubts on the realism of the traditional Marxist hope of eliminating the circumstances of injustice. Some contemporary Marxists, departing from tradition, now interpret the extraction of surplus value from workers as a derived form of injustice resting on a prior injustice in access to the means of production — suggesting Rawls’s agenda has had some impact on Marxism.
6.4.3 The Communitarian Critique
Communitarian theorists criticise Rawls for emphasising individual rights at the expense of the good of the community.
Michael Sandel (Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, 1982 — Harvard University): criticises Rawls’s notion of the disembodied or unencumbered self — an abstracted individual detached from social context. Against this, Sandel advances the notion of the situated self — a self who is invariably a member of a community. For Sandel:
- While Rawls holds that the right is prior to the good and justice is the first virtue of society, Sandel argues that justice is only a remedial virtue needed in an individualistic society.
- The common good of the community is prior to the rights of individuals.
Charles Taylor (leading communitarian political philosopher): criticises liberalism’s “atomistic” conception of the self. The well-being of the individual depends on the good of his community — therefore, recognition and protection of group or cultural rights is no less important than the just distribution of freedom and equality rights to individuals.
6.5 Summary (Key Takeaways)
- Justice is the first virtue of social institutions (Rawls); listed first in the Preamble of the Indian Constitution above liberty, equality, and fraternity.
- Derived from Latin — a bonding idea distributing to each their due rights, duties, rewards, and punishments. Aristotle’s formulation: treat equals equally, unequals unequally in proportion to their inequalities.
- Procedural justice = fairness of process; substantive justice = fairness of outcome. Needs-based justice (Marx, socialists) vs. rights-based justice (liberals) vs. deserts-based justice (Burke, Spencer).
- Rawls’s two principles: (1) equal basic liberties for all; (2) fair equality of opportunity + difference principle (inequalities only if they maximise benefit to the least advantaged). Derived through the original position and veil of ignorance — using the maximin rule.
- Nozick (libertarian): Rawls is an end-state theorist; justice lies in historical entitlement, not redistribution. Defence of free-market capitalism.
- Marxists: Rawls addresses distribution within capitalism, not capitalism’s inherent exploitation; in true communism, distributive principles would be irrelevant.
- Communitarians (Sandel, Taylor): Rawls’s unencumbered self ignores the situated, community-embedded nature of the individual; the common good is prior to individual rights.
- Despite these critiques, Rawls’s liberal-egalitarian theory of justice remains the central reference point in contemporary normative political philosophy.
