Justice, Fairness, Equality

John Rawls

Political philosophy fulfills at least 4 roles in a society’s public life

• Political philosophy can discover bases for reasoned agreement in a society where sharp divisions threaten to lead to conflict.
• Help citizens to orient themselves within their own social world. Philosophy can describe what it is to be a member of society with a certain political status.
• Probe the limits of practical political possibility. Define what is possible and even imagine what might be possible within political arrangements.
• Reconciliation: To help us understand that in spite of being an imperfect system, our political and legal institutions are based on rationalism and develop over time in a progressive fashion.

Rawls’s Theory of Justice

Rawls believed that there was no universal moral principle. What we have is a public, political culture where individuals generally agree to comply with certain established principles.

For Rawls, law raises two fundamental questions: (a) legitimacy and (b) stability.

• Legitimacy refers to the legitimate use of coercive political power. In a democracy, political power is always the power of the people as a collective body.
• Stability is what legal positivists (recall Hart and Austin) believed was necessary for the law to provide some structure, predictability, and certainty.

Unless most citizens willingly obey the law, no social order can be stable for long.

Justice

Consequently, justice assumes the quality of fairness. Justice is that which** reasonable citizens, who want to cooperate with one another on mutually acceptable terms, will recognize as a freestanding political conception generated from ideas in the public political culture that is the only basis for cooperation that all citizens can reasonably be expected to endorse.

Social Justice: Martha Nussbaum

She is known for building on John Rawls’s theory of justice through the capabilities approach and social justice.

Martha Nussbaum is an American philosopher who builds on John Rawls’s theory of justice through her capabilities approach, addressing social justice in a more inclusive way. While Rawls critiques the welfare state and capitalism for failing to ensure equal opportunities and political equality, Nussbaum shares his concerns but critiques his justification for principles of justice. She advances Amartya Sen’s capabilities approach, which posits that a dignified life requires meeting a threshold of twelve basic capabilities, including life, health, practical reason, and control over one’s environment.

Nussbaum argues that Rawls’s theory overlooks the needs of people with disabilities, citizens of other nations, and non-human animals. She emphasizes that dependency, a fundamental aspect of life, is neglected in traditional liberal theories of justice.

For example, Nussbaum argues that justice for people with disabilities should include whatever special arrangements are required for them to lead a dignified life, and the work of caring for them should be socially recognized, fairly distributed, and fairly compensated.

Nussbaum’s political liberalism is hypothetical. If we want a minimally decent society in which everyone has a dignified life, then everyone must be entitled to the threshold level of every capability essential to that dignified life.

Capabilities: Amartya Sen

According to Sen, Rawls did not account for diversity in individuals’ conversion of primary goods into effec tive The capabilities, therefore, of each individual need to be mobilized and prioritized, for there to be any hope of equality in public political culture.

Sen defined capabilities as the following:

• Personal: metabolism, physical condition, sex, reading skills, intelligence
• Social: public policies, social or religious norms, discrimination practices, gender roles, societal hierarchies, power relations
• Environmental: climate, infrastructure

Sen argued that economic growth was only possible if social reforms - such as improvements in education and public health - came first.

He invented the term “capabilities approach”: argue that in order to have functioning democracies, leaders must be responsive to the demands of the citizens.

The Impossibility of Justice: Derrida

Who is responsible for the injustices in our communities, our countries, and our world?

Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) was an Algerian-born French philosopher. According to him, law and justice are intricately connected but distinct. Law cannot exist without justice and justice cannot exist without law.

But law cuts short the possibility of justice, and justice always call on the law to go beyond!

Law is a limit. Justice wants law to be better. Maybe, justice is never achieved for all by all. However, there is no law without the pursuit of justice.