The Necessariness of Justice for Being Human
which necessariness follows from our nature
We humans are by nature social beings. That is, we live together in groups we call societies. If there is anything at all to the notion of ‘human nature’, being social in that sense is integral to it.
Every society necessarily has some governing principle. It is not possible to have a formally organized group without one.
For non-civilized societies the principle of governance has effectively been ‘one for all and all for one’ — whether it was ever formally enunciated or not. It probably did not take any time for humans for whom simple physical survival was the goal to understand that each member of society acting for the benefit of all others and all others acting for the benefit of each member of society provided the best chance to achieve that goal.
Civilization gave rise to other principles of governance. As I see it, history makes clear that the default principle for civilization is ‘rule by the most ruthless’. If no other principle is used to govern the governance of a civilized society (i.e., dominated culturally by the existence of cities), that is the form that governance will take. Any other principle represents a move away from rule by the most ruthless and a step towards justice.
Rule by the most ruthless is a state of affairs in which no constraint on the power of the ruler exists and the power to rule over all others in society is achieved by the person most willing and able to do anything at all to attain it. Rule by ‘warlords’ is the prime example of that principle of governance.
Any other principle of governance involves some kind of constraints on the power of the ruler. Most generically, the constraint of power is what justice is (as it applies to governing society — or to individuals governing themselves, for that matter). Any principle of governance other than rule by the most ruthless must involve some kind of constraint on power compared to that state of affairs. Even if it only involves constraints on how the power to rule over all others can be attained, any other approach to governance still represents some kind of constraint on power. So any principle of governance other than rule by the most ruthless has some element of justice in it. To our credit, as a species we have over time increased our understanding of what a just principle of governance must be.
Oddly, the (in?)famous (European) ‘Enlightenment’ sought to determine what a just governing principle must be based on the idea of people being not only separate and independent with respect to one another, but without any social organization of any kind. Philosophers employing that device have called such a state of affairs the “State of Nature.” It is nonsense to think of humans as anything other than social beings, and beyond absurd to think that justice could be based on any such thing. Yet, it must be acknowledged that the ‘Enlightenment thinkers’ were actually able to add to our understanding of justice based on that premise, with liberty and equality as the ‘twin pillars of justice’ for a just society.
[Though, in accounts of justice involving a Sate of Nature equality is an ex machina device employed to constrain liberty in order for society to exist, for people to move from the State of Nature, with perfect liberty, to living together in societies, where liberty is necessarily constrained, as when John Locke brought equality into his account of justice from his religious beliefs in the first of his famous Two Treatises (1689): even though he does not explicitly acknowledge it, that equality is what makes arbitrariness in human relations unjust in his approach to justice. (See below.)]
As individuals, experiencing injustice can entail material effects, as when we suffer bodily harm or have material possessions of ours damaged or destroyed or stolen. Injustice can also be directly psychological, as when a person is being ‘gaslighted’ or when a person is falsely accused of wrongdoing — or even ‘only’ gratuitously insulted.
Those are all direct instances of injustice. They are aimed specifically at a particular person. That is the case even if the victim was randomly chosen.
We can also suffer injustice indirectly. Injustices that are the result of the structure and functioning of the political process and the economy are indirect injustices. That they are indirect does not make them any less real.
Every human society necessarily has a political process and an economy. The former is the process of effecting choices for the community as a whole (i.e., choosing among perceived options and taking action to bring that choice to fruition). No community, from a book club to a nation-state, has any choice but to do that. Likewise, being born naked and vulnerable, humans must produce/acquire the necessities for survival: water, food, shelter, clothing. Being human, we all have further wants that involve goods and services. Producing/acquiring goods/services of any and all kinds is what the economy is. Even a book club requires economic activity — in the form of acquiring the chosen book, at a minimum. (Even if the book is borrowed — or stolen — it had to have been produced, with all the economic activity that entailed, for its acquisition to be accomplished.)
As I have written many times, John Locke correctly equated injustice with arbitrariness in human relations. That means acting in a way that affects other people without taking them or their interests into account (or at any rate not letting those affect one’s conduct). Any form of “direct” injustice represents precisely that.
“Indirect” injustice follows from arbitrariness in the structure/functioning of the political process or the economy. Such injustice affects all members of a society.
That is why ‘the consent of the governed’ is the starting point for a truly just form of governance. It is the starting point for democracy, making that the only truly just form that the political process can take (however imperfectly it has ever been realized).
The structure and functioning of the economy is necessarily a product of the political process. Even the Bolsheviks who remade Russia into the Soviet Union realized that they had to take political power (1917) to institute their economic paradigm, even though according to the Marxist theory they had adopted the political structure follows from economic relations. To choose to have a market-based economy is also a choice the community must effect, even if doing that only means choosing to refrain from intervening in the functioning of the economy. Such intervention can of course vary in extent — but the existence of taxation, as old as civilization, is unavoidably an instance of intervention in the economy, whatever the form of taxation might be. No economy has existed in the history of civilization that is just in its structure, much less its functioning. How equality and liberty can be combined in the structure of an economic system is a a puzzle for which I think no solution exists.
Whether injustice is direct or indirect, directly psychological or material, it has a certain psychological effect. We experience being diminished, denigrated, devalued, demeaned, even dehumanized. That psychological effect is the same however large or small the injustice that is suffered might be (though it is experienced to different degrees).
Moreover, and perhaps most importantly, I would say that we experience that effect whether we are consciously aware of it or not. If we are aware of it we usually become consciously angry, with the anger focused on the perpetrator of the injustice. I think that if we are not consciously aware of an injustice we still become angry, but is an unfocused anger that resides below the surface. When it is triggered the result can be an emotional overreaction of some kind. These days, ‘road rage’ is one example. Parents getting into fights at children’s sporting events is another. Picking groups to pick on and blame and rail against — and worse — is another possible reaction to unconsciously suffering ongoing injustice. There are countless other examples. [To be sure, it must be acknowledged that how we as individuals perceive and process injustice is related to further psychological factors — among other things , but such ruminations need not detain us here.]
Unresolved anger can, however, be something even more serious. It can evolve into a psychosis of some kind. When that cauldron of resentment blows, the result is usually an explosion of rage that results in great harm and death on some larger scale: mass (attempted) killings.
I’m not suggesting that injustice is the cause of all acts of violence, much less that violence is excused by it. I am saying that we routinely overlook the extent to which living with injustice day in and day out, including an unjust political process and/or economy, eats away at the psychological well-being of human beings. It is vitally important that the functioning of the political process or the economy is as significant as its structure is.
Justice is maximized when people are acting in accordance with the most just principle of governance we have thus far derived, and the political process and the economy are structured and functioning in accordance with it. We humans being what we are, no approach to justice will ever be perfectly realized. Moreover, the most just principle of governance at any time can always be superseded as time goes by. Still, as human beings our goal must always be to maximize justice by seeking out the most just principle of governance possible and applying it to ourselves and the — any — society of which we are members.
______________
A better understanding of justice?
That raises several ever-present questions. The first question is, what is the most just principle of governance we know of at this point in time to govern the actions of societies and of individuals that involve fellow human beings? The second question is, how does that principle apply to the conduct of individuals? The third question is, how does it apply to the political process? The fourth question is, how does it apply to the economy?
I vote for ‘mutual respect’ as the most just principle of governance that we can know of at this time. My studies have taught me that it is really the unacknowledged principle of governance of the ‘Enlightenment’. It follows from a belief in equality. It is (therefore) present in the account of justice of every Enlightenment philosopher, whether acknowledged as such or not, whether as a starting point or as a quality of human being contained in some philosophy, from John Locke, to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, and G.W.F. Hegel as well as Jeremy Bentham the other authors of utilitarianism (in which all people involved must be taken into account in calculating ‘utility’) in earlier centuries, to John Rawls as well as Jurgen Habermas and the other authors of ‘communicative ethics’ in the late 1900’s.
Explicitly acknowledging mutual respect as the principle of governance would take our understanding of justice even further. Simply being fellow humans is all that is necessary for the protections as well as the responsibilities of the principle of mutual respect to be present. ‘Equality’ is an unnecessary complication.
For individuals, mutual respect most generally means taking one another into account as we live our separate lives as independent beings together with other fellow humans in this world. At a minimum, it requires that we refrain from killing, harming, coercing, stealing, or manipulating (which includes lying, cheating, etc.) other people in our interactions with one another. That is all mutual respect really requires of us as individuals.
Who would say people should be allowed to do such things? In other words, almost all of us already understand that respecting others is what acting justly is. To act otherwise towards any fellow human being is to diminish, denigrate, devalue, demean, and even dehumanize that person.
While the onus is on each individual to govern oneself, justice is present when all involved are engaging in respect for one another. Will mutual respect always be present in individuals’ relations with one another? No. Does that mean that mutual respect is not the most just governing principle we can know of at this time? No.
As for the governance of society, I submit that the ethic of mutual respect already governs the democratic political process. After all, democracy is based on a belief in human equality, and, again, that belief obviously generates a requirement of mutual respect — though, to reiterate, equality is an unnecessary complication for justice. [I also think that having a single political party would enhance the functioning of the democratic political process.]
My studies have taught me that, unlike equality, mutual respect can be applied efficaciously to the economy without compromising liberty yet transforming the outcomes for society of the existing economy — any nation’s existing economy. That, as I see it, is the prime task at hand for all democratic nations. Undemocratic nations, as well, could still have a just economy. [Articles related to applying mutual respect to the economy can be found at the end of this article (a “2 min read”).]
More generally, a society governed by mutual respect would in fact have the maximum liberty that coexisting people can share simultaneously. In other words, we can now see that liberty is the product of justice not its source, or foundation, or predicate, or whatever.
[The implications for the governance of society with mutual respect as the principle of governance are addressed in “Beyond Liberalism.” The best summation of those implications that I have managed is probably “Equality Is All We Need” (in which I make the case that mutual respect follows from that belief).]
Learning what the most just principle of governance possible at this point in time is and applying it to the governance of our selves as well as the political process and the economy of our society is the most necessary task ‘we, the people’, as members of any society, have to undertake. As the social beings we are, achieving the most justice possible is the apotheosis of being human.
[All linked articles are here in Medium, but not behind the paywall.]