Can Just Governance Avoid Coercion?
No: but it can avoid — unjust — arbitrary coercion.
The existence of societies — people living together in groups — requires the governance of individuals. There must be rules governing conduct. Those rules must be enforced. Some form of coercion is inevitable.
Yet, unjust governance can still be distinguished from just governance. The difference lies in the presence or absence of arbitrariness in the rules and their enforcement.
As I have written many times, John Locke famously defined injustice as “being subject to the arbitrary will” of any other person(s) [in Two Treatises of Government (1689). I have read a lot of philosophy over the last fifty or so years, and I have never seen anyone even attempt to refute that definition.
[I have developed an approach to justice that is as different from the approach Locke developed as science is from religion, but in it injustice amounts to the same thing: failing to take others into account as we live our separate lives together in this world — which is another way of saying ‘arbitrariness’. In ‘real justice’, though, it is a person’s capacity to choose that is at issue, not a person’s “will:” the ‘will’ is a nebulous concept, whereas it is a material fact that choosing is integral to being human, since we humans have no choice but to effect choices, i.e., choose among perceived alternatives and take action to bring that choice to fruition. After all, anyone reading this has effected more than one choice in getting to this point in this essay. So justice is all about people respecting one another’s capacity to choose whenever any choice is being effected. (more about it)]
The antidote for arbitrariness is universality: whatever applies to any must apply to all. An absence of arbitrariness in governance must begin with the place where laws and the methods for their enforcement get formulated: the political process.
Every society will have a political process. It is neither more nor less than the process of effecting choices for the community as a whole — which societies must do as surely as individuals must.
Within that process there will always be a political system: the set of institutions via which the political process proceeds. At the center of the political process are the offices of government. They form the functional core of the process. Other institutions in the political system can include a constitution (written or not) and political rights (recognized forms of participation for individuals in the political process) well as political parties and other politically oriented organizations that are not part of the offices of government.
A just political process will avoid arbitrarily excluding members of society from participating in it. Thus, freedom of political speech for all members of a society must be more than a ‘mere’ right: it is its own ‘condition of justice’ for a just political process. Other forms of participation in the political process, i.e., voting, running for office, petitioning the government, and peaceable assembly, can be restricted, as long as any restrictions are arbitrary. Again, the antidote for arbitrariness is universality: to be a just restriction it must be universally applicable and universally applied. The only unambiguously universal restriction is age.
We have a word for a political process that meets those criteria for justness. That word is ‘democracy’ (which, as far as the structure of the process is concerned, many countries have: every democratic nation could do better — needs to find ways to do better — functionally [my proposal for that]).
A just political process generates what philosophers call ‘procedural justice’. That mean that the outcomes of the process are necessarily legitimate. The more functionally non-arbitrary a structurally just — democratic — process is, the more legitimate — just — the outcomes are.
Again, those outcomes include laws and the sanctioned manner of their enforcement. The less arbitrariness that exists in all that, the more just a nation’s governance will be.