2 - Corrective Justice and Spontaneous Order

Summary

In this chapter, I lay out the place of corrective justice by relating it to two ideas. The first is the idea of fair terms of interaction; the second the idea that whether a particular outcome is justified depends in part on how it came about. Together, these ideas lead to a conception of justice in holdings: If starting points are fair, and everyone moderates his or her behavior appropriately, the resulting holdings are also fair. Unfortunately, these two conditions are not always satisfied. I postpone the question of what counts as a fair starting point until the final chapter. In this chapter, I focus only on the issues that arise when people fail to behave reasonably. Corrective justice is a remedial virtue, the purpose of which is to undo certain effects of unreasonable behavior.

To bring this structure into relief, I take as my starting point a world without any idea of enforceable responsibility, the “natural condition of mankind” described in Chapter Thirteen of Hobbes's Leviathan. I then explore what is missing in such a world by considering the libertarian view that responsibility can be demarcated in terms of causation. Libertarians find causation an attractive basis for liability because they suppose that changes in holdings that result from voluntary actions are, in general, legitimate. Only when one person causes an injury to another should the effects of voluntary actions be undone. I show why libertarianism lacks the resources to distinguish between changes that should be and those that should not be undone.