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Justice: Real or Social?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 January 2009

Antony Flew
Antony Flew
Affiliation:
Philosophy, York University
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Extract

I

At one point in Taking Rights Seriously, Ronald Dworkin sketches an argument which would today be widely acceptable. He writes: “The University of Washington might argue that, whatever effect minority preference will have on average welfare, it will make the community more equal, and therefore more just.” It is perhaps not certain that Dworkin himself accepts that immediate inference as sound. There can, however, be no doubt but that: first, many if not most people speaking or writing today in this area do indeed take ‘equality’ to be as near as makes no matter synonymous with ‘equity’; and, second, they do indeed also identify doing (at any rate social) justice with bringing about (ever more, if never perfect) equality of condition.

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Philosophy and Policy , Volume 1 , Issue 1 , Autumn 1983 , pp. 151 - 171
Copyright
Copyright © Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation 1983

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References

1 Dworkin, Ronald, Taking Rights Seriously (London: Duckworth, 1977), 252.Google Scholar

2 I deployed many more proof texts from less ostentatiously partisan sources in The Politics of Procrustes (London, and Buffalo: Temple Smith, and Prometheus, 1981), especially Chapter II, Section 1.

3 Hansard for 6/XI/72, 845, 55.

4 Bosanquet, Nick and Townsend, Peter, Labour and Equality (London: Heinemann, 1980).Google Scholar

5 Ibid., 131 and 228; compare 61 and 227.

6 Ibid., 151.

7 Smith, Adam, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, eleventh edition, 1908, II (ii) 1: Vol. I, 191.Google Scholar

8 Mill, J. S., Utilitarianism (Everyman Edition, 1910), 44.Google Scholar

9 Menninger, Karl, The Crime of Punishment (New York: Viking, 1968), 17.Google Scholar For much more on similar lines see my Crime or Disease? (London, and New York: Macmillan, and Barnes and Noble, 1973).

10 “A Theory Of Social Justice,” in Lewis, H. D. (Ed.) Contemporary British Philosophy: Fourth Series (London: Allen and Unwin, 1976)Google Scholar; “Equality or Justice?”, French, P. A. (Ed.) Midwest Studies in Philosophy: Vol. III Studies in Ethical Theory (Morris, Minn.: Minnesota UP, 1978)Google Scholar; “Who are the Equals?” in Philosophia, 1980, 102; and, now, The Politics of Procrustes, especially Chapters II-IV.

11 “Impediments to Radical Egalitarianism,” The American Philosophical Quarterly (1981) 182.

12 Rawls, John, Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA and Oxford: Harvard University Press and Oxford University Press, 1971 and 1972).Google Scholar

13 Austin once set in an Oxford “Moral and Political Philosophy” paper the question: “‘Power politics’: what other sorts are there?” My friend Rolan Hall of the University of York tells me that the first recorded occurrence of the expression ‘social justice’ is in J. S. Mill – that at pp. 57–8 of the Everyman edition of Utilitarianism.

14 Rawls, Theory of Justice, 4.

15 Ibid., 579.

16 The mark of a just man is, as it says in the Institutes of Justinian, constans et perpetua voluntas jus suum cuique tribuere (I) [A constant and perpetual will to assign to each his own, his due].

17 Nozick, Robert, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York and Oxford: Basic Books and Blackwell, 1974), 150.Google Scholar

18 Matson, Wallace, “What Rawls Calls Justice,” The Occasional Review (1978).Google Scholar

19 For a development of these contentions see my “What Socrates should have said to Thrasymachus,” in Carter, C. L. (Ed.) Skepticism and Moral Principles (Evanston, III.: New UP, 1973).Google Scholar

20 Rawls, Theory of Justice, 7. Compare Ake, C. “Justice as Equality,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 5 (1975–1976)Google Scholar: “Our typical use of the concept of justice is in the evaluation of a society's institutions, principally its legal, political and economic institutions” (69). Compare too The Politics of Procrustes, 80.

21 Rawls, Theory of Justice, 151 and 101.

22 Ibid., 136.

23 Ibid., 13.

24 Ibid., 150–51.

25 See, for instance, Hare's, R. M. Critical Notice, The Philosophical Quarterly 23 Nos. 91 and 92 (1973): 150–55.Google Scholar

26 Rawls, Theory of Justice, 18.

27 Ibid., 15.

28 Ibid., 27 and 440.

29 See, of course, Feuerbach, L.The Essence of Christianity (New York: Harper, 1957)Google Scholar and Marx, K.The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (New York: International, 1964).Google Scholar This is an occasion for two side, and in one case snide, remarks. First: here and elsewhere, and despite the author's professions of neutrality, the assumptions of The Theory of Justice are profoundly socialist, rather than in any classical sense liberal – something which seems to have escaped its Marxist and marxisant critics, distracted and infuriated by the author's incongruous yet clearly sincere insistence on “the priority of liberty.” (243–51)

Second: the unrelenting and wholesale collectivism of the book, published in 1971, is not to be found in the original Philosophical Review article for 1958. There are several other differences too. For instance, Rawls there was careful not to confront classical Utilitarianism as a whole; and equally careful to insist that justice is “but one of the many virtues of social institutions,” his own account being “not to be confused with an all-embracing vision of a good society” (165: italics original). Again, there, if the inequalities of a practice are to be tolerable, they must “work for the advantage of every party engaging in it”; and we read not one word about “every party” being an ambiguous expression which has to be interpreted in a strange and peculiar way, as referring only to the least advantaged group. (167: italics original)

30 Rawls, Theory of Justice, 60–65. For one more critique of this disputations derivation see The Politics of Procrustes, Chapter II Section 2.

31 Ibid., Chapter IV Section 1.

32 The General Practitioner (London) for 26/XI/78. To discover how this Chairman got himself in this mess see my “The Right to Death,” in Reason Papers 6 (Santa Barbara, Ca.: Reason Foundation, 1980).

33 See for instance, Berger, PeterEthics and the New Class (Washington D.C.: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1978)Google Scholar; and compare Kristol, IrvingTwo Cheers for Capitalism (New York: Basic, 1978)Google Scholar: “No proposal for the redistribution of large fortunes will get liberal support unless that money goes into the public treasury, where liberals will have much to say as how it should be spent. That is the ‘dirty little secret’ – the hidden agenda – behind the current chatter about the need for ‘redistribution’. The talk is about equality, the substance is about power.” (224)

An even more revealing illustration, because a personal confession, comes from the other side of the Atlantic. The author of the first volume of a new International Library of Welfare, and Philosophy, having sketched a Rawlsian account of (social) justice as a (qualified) equality, remarks that one “reason for linking equality and justice is that within the theory of justice one can provide the necessary moral premises for adopting the principle of equal welfare as a prescriptive recommendation.” See Weale, A.Equality and Social Policy (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), 32.Google Scholar Bertrand Russell once remarked of the Method of Postulation, most happily, that it had all the well known advantages of theft as compared with honest toil!

34 Harrington, Michael, The Twilight of American Capitalism (New York: Touchstone, 1977).Google Scholar

35 Rawls, Theory of Justice, 7.

36 Ibid., 62.

37 See, for instance, The Politics of Procrustes, Chapter 6; and compare “Social Science: Making Visible the Invisible Hands” Quadrant (Sydney) (November 11, 1981).

38 “Equality” in PAS 56 (1955–1956): 305.

39 Liberty, Equality and Fraternity (London: Smith and Elder, 1873), 199. Compare: Sidgwick, H.The Methods of Ethics (London: Macmillan, Sixth Edition, 1901), 293Google Scholar, and Ross, A.On Law and Justice (Berkeley and Los Angeles: California UP, 1959), 268 and 273.Google Scholar

40 Nielsen, “Impediments,” 121.

41 Ibid., 122.

42 Ibid., 122 n.

43 Ibid., 122.

44 Compare: The Politics of Procrustes, Chapters II Section 5, V Section 2 and VIII.

45 See, for a small collection of examples, my “In Defence of Reformism,” Question Seven (London: Pemberton, 1974).

46 Nielsen, “Impediments,” 124.

47 Ibid., 124 and 125.

48 Ibid., 124.