From ‘The Golden Rule’ to ‘Real Justice’: Mutual Respect as the Ethic of Justice
An ethic is a rule to govern the conduct of human beings. The ethic of justice is the rule that applies to all people, at all times, in all places. It is worth emphasizing that acting as a member of an organization — be it government or a business — does not in any way absolve us of our overriding responsibility to act justly.
The Golden Rule is the earliest formulation of the ethic of mutual respect. Every major religion (and then some) has that rule in some form in its tradition. That same link also quotes versions of that Rule from Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle (among other famous philosophers). In its formulation that Rule generates an idea of human equality.
The ethic of mutual respect also follows from a belief in human equality. Given the place of equality in Liberalism, it is unsurprising that every Liberal philosopher that has ever lived has mutual respect in some form (explicit or implicit) in whatever specific approach to justice any of them has developed: John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, G. W. F. Hegel, John Rawls, etc. As a response to the postmodern critique of the Liberal tradition, various philosophers (e.g., Jϋrgen Habermas, Bruce Ackerman, and Karl-Otto Apel) sought to develop a ‘communicative’ ethic that eschewed having equality as a conceptual ‘foundation’ for justice, but all such efforts do presuppose mutual respect in the communicative process — following from the (given) equal standing of all people in the process.
The most influential Liberal philosopher was Locke (Two Treatises of Government: 1689). He is most famous for equating justice with liberty. All other philosophers in that tradition since him have found some way to recognize a necessary place for liberty in a just society — even Rousseau and Hegel, who both eschewed Locke’s radical individualism. As recently as 1971 Rawls made maximizing liberty “lexically prior to” any other consideration in achieving a just society.
Despite the place of liberty in Locke’s conception of justice, mutual respect is the determiner of justice in his approach to it. He insisted that any person’s liberty ends at the “person and property” of any other person. That is mutual respect.
It comes from equality: Locke argued for human equality in his first Treatise; liberty-as-justice is in the second one. Mutual respect maximizes the liberty that coexisting human beings can share simultaneously.
All of those iterations of mutual respect have been based on a belief. Sometimes the underlying belief has been sacral/theological: how [some version of] a Higher Power wants of us to treat one another. Sometimes the belief has been secular/ideological, without any reference to any ‘Higher Power’.
Liberalism was an advance in our understanding of justice. For the first time, universality was recognized as being integral to justice. Before, people might have thought that this or that conception of justice should be adopted by every individual/society, but Liberalism made the ‘universal’ values of equality and liberty the foundation of justice. Those values are not in fact universal, but recognizing the necessity of universality was nonetheless an advance in justice.
My studies have taught me that the ethic of mutual respect also follows from the observation within material existence that human beings have no choice but to effect choices (which I got from Warren J. Samuels*). Those choices can range from the most trivial to the life-changing.
So the ethic of justice is mutual respect in effecting choices. Technically, mutual respect is the ethic of justice and effecting choices is the domain of justice, the large but finite realm of life in which people must be governed in their actions by that ethic. Outside it belief-based morality takes over.
I call this approach to justice ‘real justice’ because in it the ethic of mutual respect follows from that observation within the ‘real world’ rather than any belief. Since in real justice both the determiner of justice (the observation) and the referents of justice (actions undertaken to effect any choice that involve at least one other human being in any way, including its effects on others) are located within material existence, it has an undeniable commonality that no belief-based ethic can have. Since in real justice both the determiner and the referents of justice are contained within material existence, to justify violating that ethic by going ‘outside’ material existence in any way (e.g., to beliefs, to include any ideology or theology, etc.) to deny its universally reflexive applicability — its obligations on/protections for every human being — is legitimately de-legitimated.
We can think of mutual respect as the definitive, sufficient, prescriptive condition of justice. That is, it tells us what we must do to act justly: take others into account as we live our separate lives together in this world. There is no limit on how justly a person might act.
There is a minimum, necessary, proscriptive condition of justice. It draws a clear, explicit line between acting justly and acting unjustly. To keep from acting unjustly we must abide by a handful of absolute prohibitions: no killing, harming, coercing, stealing, or manipulating (which includes lying, cheating etc.). Anyone who is doing none of those things is respecting others enough, being just enough, being “Golden” enough.
Those prohibitions follow more clearly from real justice than they do from any belief-based requirement of mutual respect. Since choosing is integral to being human, respecting one another ’s capacity to choose must be integral to our actions involving one another — beginning with allowing each other to choose whether/how/to what extent to be involved whenever any choice is being effected. To fail to respect another human being’s capacity to choose is to deny that person’s humanity, to claim by ones actions that the person involved is not (fully) human. No person can be under any obligation to accept such a claim. (Unavoidable hierarchies, such as parent/child and boss/underling, are an easily surmountable issue.)
In short, we must never co-opt or (otherwise) preempt anyone’s capacity to choose. Those enumerated prohibitions are general examples of co-opting/(otherwise) preempting people’s capacity to choose.
There are many paths to the ethic of mutual respect. It is high time humanity recognized mutual respect as the ethic of justice.
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*Warren J. Samuels, “Welfare Economics, Property, and Power” Perspectives of Property (Gene Wunderlich and W. L. Gibson, eds.): 1973.
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Applying mutual respect to the governance of society would take us “Beyond Liberalism” (here in Medium, but not behind the paywall).