Four Essential Propositions for a Better Understanding of Justice

as if anyone cares what I have learned about it

Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash

1. The concern of justice is how human beings treat one another. That includes how all individual members of society are treated by society as a whole, to include the structure and functioning of the political process and the economy. It also (obviously) includes the treatment of people who are present in a society who are not members of it, as well as how societies — to include nation-states — interact. Any other issues regarding the conduct of human beings, such as how people treat animals, is a moral issue that is not a matter of justice.
2. Liberalism — capitalized, i.e., the meta-ideology that has spawned the narrower political ideologies of libertarianism, conservatism, liberalism, and democratic socialism — is the best understanding of justice humanity has heretofore derived. In it liberty and equality are the ‘twin pillars of justice’ for a just society.
3. “Equality” is an unnecessary complication. All that is necessary for justice to apply is interactions involving human beings.
4. Properly understood, liberty is the product of justice, not its source, or foundation, or predicate, or whatever. How can it be any of those? Justice is all about constraining power; liberty is all about people using whatever sources of power they have available to them to do whatever they want to do and can do. (In what should be acknowledged as one of the most important essays in human history Warren J. Samuels discussed “social power” as the ability to effect choices: “Welfare Economics, Property. and Power” in Perspectives of Property, edited by Gene Wunderlich and W. L. Gibson, Jr.) Some insist that liberty is distinguished from freedom by the existence of acknowledged constraints, but if that is the case that makes those constraints the source of justice.

We simply must understand that the ethic of justice is mutual respect, i.e., taking one another into account as we live our separate lives together in this world. What possible argument against that proposition can exist? A requirement of mutual respect does follow from a belief in equality; a society governed by mutual respect would have the maximum liberty that coexisting people can share simultaneously.

for more: “The Necessariness of Justice for Being Human” (also here in Medium, but not behind the paywall, which has links to more articles, all here in Medium but none behind the paywall)