167 - Procedural justice

Summary

Rawls’s principal account of the justice of procedures appears in §14 of A Theory of Justice (TJ 73–78). There Rawls distinguishes pure from impure procedural justice. In a case of impure procedural justice, the justice of a procedure is determined by the justice of the outcomes it produces; in a case of pure procedural justice, by contrast, the justice of the procedure confers justice on the outcomes it produces.

Among cases of impure procedural justice Rawls distinguishes cases of perfect impure procedural justice from cases of imperfect impure procedural justice. In a case of perfect impure procedural justice, it is possible to design a procedure that guarantees a just outcome. Rawls offers as an example the problem of cake division between two persons, where one-cuts-the-other-chooses ensures that each person receives at least half the cake by her own estimation. In a case of imperfect impure procedural justice, no procedure guarantees a just outcome. Rawls’s example here is a criminal trial. The just outcome is for the guilty to be convicted and the not guilty to be acquitted, but there is no set of institutional procedures that enables this result always to be reached. Rawls’s illustration of pure procedural justice is a lottery. In this case no particular outcome is just as such; one person might win fairly, or another. What makes an outcome just is that the procedure is fairly conducted, say by having each ticket accorded an equal chance of winning (CP 310–312; PL 148–150).