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Definition of injustice

injustice , injury , wrong , grievance mean an act that inflicts undeserved hurt.

injustice applies to any act that involves unfairness to another or violation of one's rights.

injury applies in law specifically to an injustice for which one may sue to recover compensation.

wrong applies also in law to any act punishable according to the criminal code; it may apply more generally to any flagrant injustice.

grievance applies to a circumstance or condition that constitutes an injustice to the sufferer and gives just ground for complaint.

Examples of injustice in a Sentence

These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'injustice.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Word History

Middle English, from Middle French, from Latin injustitia , from injustus unjust, from in- + justus just

14th century, in the meaning defined at sense 1

Phrases Containing injustice

• do an injustice to (someone or something)
• do (someone or something) an injustice

Dictionary Entries Near injustice

in justification of

Cite this Entry

“Injustice.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary , Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/injustice. Accessed 8 Apr. 2024.

Kids Definition

Kids definition of injustice, legal definition, legal definition of injustice, more from merriam-webster on injustice.

Nglish: Translation of injustice for Spanish Speakers

Britannica English: Translation of injustice for Arabic Speakers

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By Michelle Maiese

June 2003  

The Many Faces of Injustice

While it is difficult to give a complete and adequate definition of justice, most observers can recognize clear examples of serious injustice when they arise.[1] Such injustice comes in various forms, wherever the norms of distributive justice , procedural justice, or human rights are violated .

Some actions, such as theft and murder, are commonly recognized as unjust by governments and prohibited by domestic law. However, there are also systemic forms of injustice that may persist in a society. These traditions and structures give rise to profound injustices that can be difficult to recognize.[2] In some cases, these unfair conditions are imposed by the ruling party itself, whether it is an authoritarian government or an outside aggressor. Those in power sometimes use the state's legal and political systems to violate the political, economic, and social rights of subordinate groups.[3]

Political injustice involves the violation of individual liberties, including the denial of voting rights or due process, infringements on rights to freedom of speech or religion, and inadequate protection from cruel and unusual punishment.[4] Such injustice often stems from unfair procedures, and involves political systems in which some but not others are allowed to have voice and representation in the processes and decisions that affect them.[5] This sort of procedural injustice can contribute to serious social problems as well as political ones. If voting or litigation procedures, for example, are perceived to be unjust, any outcome they produce is liable to be unstable and produce conflict.[6] In addition, any procedures that are carried out in a biased manner are likely to contribute to problems of religious, ethnic, gender, or race discrimination. When the procedure in question has to do with employment or wages, such issues can lead to serious economic and social problems.

Economic injustice involves the state's failure to provide individuals with basic necessities of life, such as access to adequate food and housing, and its maintenance of huge discrepancies in wealth. In the most extreme cases of maldistribution, some individuals suffer from poverty while the elite of that society live in relative luxury.[7] Such injustice can stem from unfair hiring procedures, lack of available jobs and education, and insufficient health care. All of these conditions may lead individuals to believe that they have not received a "fair share" of the benefits and resources available in that society.

Even more serious than the injustices discussed above are war crimes and crimes against humanity. During wartime, individuals sometimes perform acts that violate the rules of just war set forth in international law . When soldiers engage in wars of aggression, attack non-combatants or pursue their enemies beyond what is reasonable, they commit not acts of war, but acts of murder.[8] However, these are not the only injustices associated with war and protracted conflict. Such conflict can also lead to severe human rights violations , including genocide , torture, and slavery. These crimes violate individuals' most basic rights to life and physical safety.

When political or legal institutions fail to protect individuals' fundamental rights and liberties, members of the unjustly treated group feel disempowered .[9] They are likely to view the institutions that impose such conditions as unjust, and thus find themselves in the midst of a justice conflict . If the subordinate group believes that it lacks the power to change things through political or diplomatic means, it may conclude that the only effective way to pursue justice is through violent confrontation.[10] However, such confrontations tend to produce even more injustice. In addition, because the dominant group typically has more power to inflict harm, such struggles often fail. Therefore, violence is often an ineffective way of addressing injustice, and many believe that it should be used only as a last resort.

Responding To Injustice

Many scholars and activists note that in order to truly address injustice internationally, we must strive to understand its underlying causes. These causes have to do with underdevelopment, economic pressures, various social problems, and international conditions.[11] Indeed, the roots of repression, discrimination, and other injustice stem from deeper and more complex political, social, and economic problems. It is only by understanding and ameliorating these root causes and strengthening civil society that we can truly protect human rights .

There are various ways to address the political, economic and social injustices mentioned above. Whether a response proves to be appropriate and effective depends on the nature of the grievance.

Addressing political injustice is often a matter of developing institutions of fair governance, such as an accountable police force and judiciary. Legislative action and executive decision-making should likewise be held accountable. Such measures are sometimes a matter of reforming state institutions or revising state constitutions.

In cases where some groups are excluded from political participation, the state can remedy violations of political rights by promoting political inclusion and empowering subordinate groups. Public decision-making should respond to the will of the citizens, and members of the society should have the opportunity to participate in the formulation, execution, and monitoring of state policies. In other words, a culture of political involvement and public participation should be fostered. In addition, there are various social structural changes that might give groups more social, economic, and/or political power. This is often accomplished through the strengthening of the economy and civil society in conjunction with democratization efforts. In some cases countries require outside assistance for election monitoring , nation-building programs and the development of governmental infrastructure to make their political system more stable.

Addressing systemic economic injustice is often a matter of economic reforms that give groups better access to jobs, health care, and education. In many cases, lack of access to basic services stems from enormous inequalities in resource distribution. Redistribution of benefits and resources can thus be an important component of social structural changes to remedy injustice. There are various institutional and economic development reforms that might be put in place to raise living standards and boost economic growth. In addition, by creating social and economic safety nets, states can eliminate tension and instability caused by unfair resource allocation.

For example, development of programs that provide assistance for the poor, pensions for the elderly, and training and education for workers help remedy injustice,[12] tax reform, giving workers the right to unionize and demand a fair wage, advancing ecological policies to protect and preserve the environment, and improving access to land ownership can also help in particular cases.[13]

Balancing out gross inequalities in wealth might also be part of compensatory justice after periods of war. During periods of postwar adjustment and peacebuilding efforts, long-term economic policy must aim to achieve equity, or balance in the distribution of income and wealth. Such efforts to ensure a just distribution of benefits following conflict are typically accompanied by democratization efforts to ensure a more balanced distribution of power. When neglect of economic rights stems from the destruction caused by protracted conflict, countries may require outside aid to remedy injustice and avoid future instability. Humanitarian aid and development assistance are often needed to help a society build its economic resource base and ensure that the needs of its citizens are met. Issues of distributive justice are in this way central to any reconstruction program that aims at economic vitalization and rebuilding post-war economic systems .

Responding to War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity

Severe violations of basic rights to life and physical safety are sometimes enacted through government policies or inflicted during the course of warfare. It is commonly recognized that government leaders and soldiers, as well as civilians, must be held accountable for perpetrating such injustices.

International humanitarian law has been enacted to preserve humanity in all circumstances, even during conflicts. Various international committees are in place to monitor compliance with human rights standards and report any violations. When breaches occur, the perpetrators must somehow be brought to justice.

According to the notion of retributive justice , past acts of injustice or wrongdoing warrant punishment. Those who perpetrate war crimes or crimes against humanity should be brought to justice. When injustices are committed in the initiation or the conduct of warfare, retribution is typically accomplished through international courts or tribunals that carry out war crimes adjudication.

In other cases, human rights violations form part of national policy. Most believe that government officials should be held accountable for institution policies of apartheid, forced disappearance, torture, or genocide . Such breaches are typically brought to the attention of international tribunals or tried in an international court. Punishment is thought to reinforce the rules of international law and to deny those who have violated those rules any unfair advantages. In addition, many believe that punishment deters other would-be offenders from committing similar crimes in the future.

However, international law and adjudication is often insufficient to address grave injustice. When breaches do occur, they are brought to the attention of international tribunals or a war crimes tribunal . As conditions escalate in violence and more individuals are taken prisoner, tortured, or executed, it becomes more difficult to resort to the legal path.[14]

Some maintain that the vigilant observance of the international community is necessary to ensure justice.[15] Various nongovernmental organization (NGOs) , including Amnesty International and the International Commission of Jurists, are devoted to bringing injustice to light and pressuring governments to address the injustice. Historically, the United Nations has likewise played a central role in dealing with international justice issues.

Many maintain that massive violations of human rights, such as genocide and crimes against humanity, warrant military intervention . If, through its atrocious actions, a state destroys the lives and rights of its citizens, it temporarily forfeits its claims to legitimacy and sovereignty.[16] In such cases, outside governments have a positive duty to take steps to protect human rights and stamp out injustice.

However, this sort of response is limited, because governments are often reluctant to commit military forces and resources to defend human rights in other states.[17] In addition, the use of violence to end human rights violations poses a moral dilemma insofar as such interventions may lead to further loss of innocent lives.[18] It is imperative that the least amount of force necessary to achieve humanitarian objectives be used, that intervention not do more harm than good, and that it be motivated by genuine humanitarian concerns. Otherwise, such interventions are likely to simply cause more injustice.

Restoring Justice Once Conflict Has Ended

A central goal of responding to injustice is paving the way for future peace. Once conflict has ended and policies of oppression have been repealed, society members face the task of rebuilding their society. Many believe that measures aimed at restorative justice are well-suited for this task.

Restorative Justice is concerned with healing wounds of victims and repairing harm done to interpersonal relationships and the community. It can play a crucial role in responding to severe human rights violations or cases of genocide. Huge advances are made when governments tell the truth about past atrocities carried out by the state.[19] It is thought that true healing requires remembering the atrocities committed, repenting, and forgiving. War crimes inquiries and truth commissions can aid in the process of memory and truth telling and help to make public the extent to which victims have suffered.

Restoration often becomes a matter of restitution or war reparations. In cases where clear acts of injustice have taken place, some type of compensation package can help to meet the material and emotional needs of victims and remedy the injustice. Repentance can also help to re-establish relationships among the conflicting parties and help them to move toward reconciliation . In some cases, conflicts can end more peacefully when parties acknowledge their guilt and apologize than when formal war crimes adjudication or criminal proceedings are used.

In cases of civil war, because the line between offenders and victims can become blurred, a central goal of peacebuilding is to restore the community as a whole. Restoration often becomes tied to the transformation of the relationship between the conflicting parties. However, such restoration cannot take place unless it is supported by wider social conditions and unless the larger community makes restorative processes available.

Many note that an adequate response to injustice must involve social structural changes , reconstruction programs to help communities ravaged by conflict, democratization and the creation of institutions of civil society. Only then can the underlying causes of injustice be remedied.

[1] Paul Wehr, Heidi Burgess, and Guy Burgess. Justice Without Violence. (Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1994), 9.

[2] Morton Deutsch, "Justice and Conflict." In The Handbook of Conflict Resolution: Theory and Practice , ed. M. Deutsch and P.T. Coleman (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Inc. Publishers, 2000), 55.

[3] Wehr, Burgess, and Burgess, 9.

[4] Wehr, Burgess, and Burgess, 37.

[5] Deutsch, 56.

[6] Deutsch, 52.

[7] Wehr, Burgess, and Burgess, 37.

[8] Alex Moseley, "Just War Theory," in The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2001)

[on-line] available at: http://www.utm.edu/research/iep/j/justwar.htm , accessed January 30, 2003.

[9] Wehr, Burgess, and Burgess, 9.

[10] Wehr, Burgess, and Burgess, 7.

[11] Antonio Cassese, Human Rights in a Changing World . (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), 59.

[12] "Reconciling Social Policy and Economic Reform," an Interview with Domingo Cavallo by the Center for International Private Enterprise, Economic Reform Today, [on-line] available at http://www.cipe.org/publications/fs/ert/e22/cavE22.htm , accessed on January 30, 2003. (No longer available as of March 5th 2013)

[13] Gustavo Palma Murga, "Promised the Earth: Agrarian Reform in the Guatemalan Socio-Economic Agreement," (Conciliation Resources, Accord, 1997) [on-line] available at http://www.c-r.org/accord-article/promised-earth-agrarian-reform-socio-economic-agreement , accessed on January 30, 2003.

[14] Michel Veuthey, "International Humanitarian Law and the Restoration and Maintenance of Peace." African Security Review 7, no. 5 (1998) [on-line] available from http://www.iss.co.za/Pubs/ASR/7No5/InternationalHumanitarian.html , accessed on January 30, 2003.

[15] Cassese, 55-6.

[16] Don Hubert and Thomas G. Weiss et al. The Responsibility to Protect: Supplementary Volume to the Report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty. (Canada: International Development Research Centre, 2001), 136.

[17] Hubert and Weiss, et al., 136.

[18] Hubert and Weiss, et al., 137.

[19] Peggy Hutchison and Harmon Wray. "What is Restorative Justice?" [on-line] Available at: http://gbgm-umc.org/nwo/99ja/what.html , accessed on January 27, 2003.

Use the following to cite this article: Maiese, Michelle. "Addressing Injustice." Beyond Intractability . Eds. Guy Burgess and Heidi Burgess. Conflict Information Consortium, University of Colorado, Boulder. Posted: June 2003 < http://www.beyondintractability.org/essay/address-injustice >.

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Social Injustice: Essays in Political Philosophy

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Hugh Lazenby, Social Injustice: Essays in Political Philosophy, The Philosophical Quarterly , Volume 65, Issue 261, October 2015, Pages 865–867, https://doi.org/10.1093/pq/pqv003

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Social Injustice is a collection of thirteen essays addressing a variety of topics including methodology in applied political theory, exploitation, torture, contractarianism and democracy. Only two of the essays are previously unpublished. These sandwich the other essays. The first is a defence of the idea that social injustice is an important research topic. The last is a taxonomy of three varieties of socialism (liberal, democratic and market) and an analysis of the core values these varieties share (equality and community). As the first essay is on the theme of the book, and is supposed to connect the other essays, I will dedicate the majority of this review to it.

Much political philosophy of the past fifty years has been concerned with identifying what a socially just state should look like. Social injustice has received relatively little attention. One explanation for this is the prevalence of the view that there is nothing interesting to say about injustice other than that it occurs when justice is absent. Bufacchi's central claim is that this view, and the corresponding focus on identifying a socially just state, is mistaken. For him, injustice may arise from a number of distinct sources. In order to begin to redress injustice, we must have an account of these sources. The study of injustice should therefore be given a kind of priority over the study of justice. Or, as he puts it rather more strongly, ‘before we can say anything meaningful about social justice, it is imperative to have a clear idea of what social injustice is, and why social injustice is the paramount social problem to be resolved’ (p. 3).

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Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Western theories of justice.

Justice is one of the most important moral and political concepts.  The word comes from the Latin jus , meaning right or law.  The Oxford English Dictionary defines the “just” person as one who typically “does what is morally right” and is disposed to “giving everyone his or her due,” offering the word “fair” as a synonym.  But philosophers want to get beyond etymology and dictionary definitions to consider, for example, the nature of justice as both a moral virtue of character and a desirable quality of political society, as well as how it applies to ethical and social decision-making.  This article will focus on Western philosophical conceptions of justice.  These will be the greatest theories of ancient Greece (those of Plato and Aristotle ) and of medieval Christianity ( Augustine and Aquinas ), two early modern ones ( Hobbes and Hume ), two from more recent modern times (Kant and Mill), and some contemporary ones (Rawls and several successors).  Typically the article considers not only their theories of justice but also how philosophers apply their own theories to controversial social issues—for example, to civil disobedience, punishment, equal opportunity for women, slavery, war, property rights, and international relations.

For Plato, justice is a virtue establishing rational order, with each part performing its appropriate role and not interfering with the proper functioning of other parts. Aristotle says justice consists in what is lawful and fair, with fairness involving equitable distributions and the correction of what is inequitable.  For Augustine, the cardinal virtue of justice requires that we try to give all people their due; for Aquinas, justice is that rational mean between opposite sorts of injustice, involving proportional distributions and reciprocal transactions.  Hobbes believed justice is an artificial virtue, necessary for civil society, a function of the voluntary agreements of the social contract; for Hume, justice essentially serves public utility by protecting property (broadly understood).  For Kant, it is a virtue whereby we respect others’ freedom, autonomy, and dignity by not interfering with their voluntary actions, so long as those do not violate others’ rights; Mill said justice is a collective name for the most important social utilities, which are conducive to fostering and protecting human liberty.  Rawls analyzed justice in terms of maximum equal liberty regarding basic rights and duties for all members of society, with socio-economic inequalities requiring moral justification in terms of equal opportunity and beneficial results for all; and various post-Rawlsian philosophers develop alternative conceptions.

Western philosophers generally regard justice as the most fundamental of all virtues for ordering interpersonal relations and establishing and maintaining a stable political society.  By tracking the historical interplay of these theories, what will be advocated is a developing understanding of justice in terms of respecting persons as free, rational agents.  One may disagree about the nature, basis, and legitimate application of justice, but this is its core.

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1. Ancient Greece

For all their originality, even Plato’s and Aristotle’s philosophies did not emerge in a vacuum.  As far back in ancient Greek literature as Homer, the concept of dikaion , used to describe a just person, was important.  From this emerged the general concept of dikaiosune , or justice, as a virtue that might be applied to a political society.  The issue of what does and does not qualify as just could logically lead to controversy regarding the origin of justice, as well as that concerning its essence.  Perhaps an effective aid to appreciating the power of their thought is to view it in the context of the teachings of the Sophists, those itinerant teachers of fifth-century ancient Greece who tried to pass themselves off as “wise” men.  In his trial, Socrates was at pains to dissociate himself from them, after his conviction refusing to save himself, as a typical Sophist would, by employing an act of civil disobedience to escape ( Dialogues, pp. 24-26, 52-56; 18b-19d, 50a-54b) ; Plato is more responsible than anyone else for giving them the bad name that sticks with them to this present time; and Aristotle follows him in having little use for them as instructors of rhetoric, philosophy, values, and the keys to success.  So what did these three great philosophers (literally “lovers of wisdom”) find so ideologically objectionable about the Sophists?  The brief answer is, their relativism and their skepticism.  The first important one, Protagoras, captures the former with his famous saying, “Man is the measure of all things—of the things that are, that they are, and of the things that are not, that they are not”; and he speaks to the latter with a declaration of agnosticism regarding the existence of divinities.  Gorgias (Plato named dialogues after both of them) is remembered for a striking three-part statement of skepticism, holding that nothing really exists, that, even if something did exist, we could not grasp it, and that, even if we could grasp something real, we could never express it to anyone else.  If all values are subjective and/or unknowable, then what counts as just gets reduced to a matter of shifting opinion.  We can easily anticipate how readily Sophists would apply such relativism and skepticism to justice.  For example, Thrasymachus (who figures into the first book of Plato’s Republic ) is supposed to have said that there must not be any gods who care about us humans because, while justice is our greatest good, men commonly get away with injustice.  But the most significant Sophist statement regarding justice arguably comes from Antiphon, who employs the characteristic distinction between custom ( nomos ) and nature ( physis ) with devastating effect.  He claims that the laws of justice, matters of convention, should be obeyed when other people are observing us and may hold us accountable; but, otherwise, we should follow the demands of nature.  The laws of justice, extrinsically derived, presumably involve serving the good of others, the demands of nature, which are internal, serving self-interest.  He even suggests that obeying the laws of justice often renders us helpless victims of those who do not ( First , pp. 211, 232, 274, 264-266).  If there is any such objective value as natural justice, then it is reasonable for us to attempt a rational understanding of it.  On the other hand, if justice is merely a construction of customary agreement, then such a quest is doomed to frustration and failure.  With this as a backdrop, we should be able to see what motivated Plato and Aristotle to seek a strong alternative.

Plato’s masterful Republic (to which we have already referred) is most obviously a careful analysis of justice, although the book is far more wide-ranging than that would suggest.  Socrates, Plato’s teacher and primary spokesman in the dialogue, gets critically involved in a discussion of that very issue with three interlocutors early on.  Socrates provokes Cephalus to say something which he spins into the view that justice simply boils down to always telling the truth and repaying one’s debts.  Socrates easily demolishes this simplistic view with the effective logical technique of a counter-example:  if a friend lends you weapons, when he is sane, but then wants them back to do great harm with them, because he has become insane, surely you should not return them at that time and should even lie to him, if necessary to prevent great harm.  Secondly, Polemarchus, the son of Cephalus, jumps into the discussion, espousing the familiar, traditional view that justice is all about giving people what is their due.  But the problem with this bromide is that of determining who deserves what.  Polemarchus may reflect the cultural influence of the Sophists, in specifying that it depends on whether people are our friends, deserving good from us, or foes, deserving harm.  It takes more effort for Socrates to destroy this conventional theory, but he proceeds in stages:  (1) we are all fallible regarding who are true friends, as opposed to true enemies, so that appearance versus reality makes it difficult to say how we should treat people; (2) it seems at least as significant whether people are good or bad as whether they are our friends or our foes; and (3) it is not at all clear that justice should excuse, let alone require, our deliberately harming anyone ( Republic , pp. 5-11; 331b-335e).  If the first inadequate theory of justice was too simplistic, this second one was downright dangerous.

The third, and final, inadequate account presented here is that of the Sophist Thrasymachus.  He roars into the discussion, expressing his contempt for all the poppycock produced thus far and boldly asserting that justice is relative to whatever is advantageous to the stronger people (what we sometimes call the “might makes right” theory).  But who are the “stronger” people?  Thrasymachus cannot mean physically stronger, for then inferior humans would be superior to finer folks like them.  He clarifies his idea that he is referring to politically powerful people in leadership positions.  But, next, even the strongest leaders are sometimes mistaken about what is to their own advantage, raising the question of whether people ought to do what leaders suppose is to their own advantage or only what actually is so.  (Had Thrasymachus phrased this in terms of what serves the interest of society itself, the same appearance versus reality distinction would apply.)  But, beyond this, Socrates rejects the exploitation model of leadership, which sees political superiors as properly exploiting inferiors (Thrasymachus uses the example of a shepherd fattening up and protecting his flock of sheep for his own selfish gain), substituting a service model in its place (his example is of the good medical doctor, who practices his craft primarily for the welfare of patients).  So, now, if anything like this is to be accepted as our model for interpersonal relations, then Thrasymachus embraces the “injustice” of self-interest as better than serving the interests of others in the name of “justice.”  Well, then, how are we to interpret whether the life of justice or that of injustice is better?  Socrates suggests three criteria for judgment:  which is the smarter, which is the more secure, and which is the happier way of life; he argues that the just life is better on all three counts.  Thus, by the end of the first book, it looks as if Socrates has trounced all three of these inadequate views of justice, although he himself claims to be dissatisfied because we have only shown what justice is not, with no persuasive account of its actual nature (ibid., pp. 14-21, 25-31; 338c-345b, 349c-354c).  Likewise, in Gorgias , Plato has Callicles espouse the view that, whatever conventions might seem to dictate, natural justice dictates that superior people should rule over and derive greater benefits than inferior people, that society artificially levels people because of a bias in favor of equality.  Socrates is then made to criticize this theory by analyzing what sort of superiority would be relevant and then arguing that Callicles is erroneously advocating in justice, a false value, rather than the genuine one of true justice ( Gorgias , pp. 52-66; 482d-493c; see, also, Laws , pp. 100-101, 172; 663, 714 for another articulation of something like Thrasymachus’ position).

In the second book of Plato’s Republic , his brothers, Glaucon and Adeimantus, take over the role of primary interlocutors.  They quickly make it clear that they are not satisfied with Socrates’ defense of justice.  Glaucon reminds us that there are three different sorts of goods—intrinsic ones, such as joy, merely instrumental ones, such as money-making, and ones that are both instrumentally and intrinsically valuable, such as health—in order to ask which type of good is justice.  Socrates responds that justice belongs in the third category, rendering it the richest sort of good.  In that case, Glaucon protests, Socrates has failed to prove his point.  If his debate with Thrasymachus accomplished anything at all, it nevertheless did not establish any intrinsic value in justice.  So Glaucon will play devil’s advocate and resurrect the Sophist position, in order to challenge Socrates to refute it in its strongest form.  He proposes to do this in three steps:  first, he will argue that justice is merely a conventional compromise (between harming others with impunity and being their helpless victims), agreed to by people for their own selfish good and socially enforced (this is a crude version of what will later become the social contract theory of justice in Hobbes); second, he illustrates our allegedly natural selfish preference for being unjust if we can get away with it by the haunting story of the ring of Gyges, which provides its wearer with the power to become invisible at will and, thus, to get away with the most wicked of injustices—to which temptation everyone would, sooner or later, rationally succumb; and, third, he tries to show that it is better to live unjustly than justly if one can by contrasting the unjust person whom everyone thinks just with the just person who is thought to be unjust, claiming that, of course, it would be better to be the former than the latter.  Almost as soon as Glaucon finishes, his brother Adeimantus jumps in to add two more points to the case against justice:  first, parents instruct their children to behave justly not because it is good in itself but merely because it tends to pay off for them; and, secondly, religious teachings are ineffective in encouraging us to avoid injustice because the gods will punish it and to pursue justice because the gods will reward it, since the gods may not even exist or, if they do, they may well not care about us or, if they are concerned about human behavior, they can be flattered with prayers and bribed with sacrifices to let us get away with wrongdoing ( Republic , pp. 33-42; 357b-366e).  So the challenge for Socrates posed by Plato’s brothers is to show the true nature of justice and that it is intrinsically valuable rather than only desirable for its contingent consequences.

In defending justice against this Sophist critique, Plato has Socrates construct his own positive theory.  This is set up by means of an analogy comparing justice, on the large scale, as it applies to society, and on a smaller scale, as it applies to an individual soul.  Thus justice is seen as an essential virtue of both a good political state and a good personal character.  The strategy hinges on the idea that the state is like the individual writ large—each comprising three main parts such that it is crucial how they are interrelated—and that analyzing justice on the large scale will facilitate our doing so on the smaller one.  In Book IV, after cobbling together his blueprint of the ideal republic, Socrates asks Glaucon where justice is to be found, but they agree they will have to search for it together.  They agree that, if they have succeeded in establishing the foundations of a “completely good” society, it would have to comprise four pivotal virtues:  wisdom, courage, temperance, and justice.  If they can properly identify the other three of those four, whatever remains that is essential to a completely good society must be justice.  Wisdom is held to be prudent judgment among leaders; courage is the quality in defenders or protectors whereby they remain steadfast in their convictions and commitments in the face of fear; and temperance (or moderation) is the virtue to be found in all three classes of citizens, but especially in the producers, allowing them all to agree harmoniously that the leaders should lead and everyone else follow.  So now, by this process-of-elimination analysis, whatever is left that is essential to a “completely good” society will allegedly be justice.  It then turns out that “justice is doing one’s own work and not meddling with what isn’t one’s own.”  So the positive side of socio-political justice is each person doing the tasks assigned to him or her; the negative side is not interfering with others doing their appointed tasks.  Now we move from this macro-level of political society to the psychological micro-level of an individual soul, pressing the analogy mentioned above.  Plato has Socrates present an argument designed to show that reason in the soul, corresponding to the leaders or “guardians” of the state, is different from both the appetites, corresponding to the productive class, and the spirited part of the soul, corresponding to the state’s defenders or “auxiliaries” and that the appetites are different from spirit.  Having established the parallel between the three classes of the state and the three parts of the soul, the analogy suggests that a “completely good” soul would also have to have the same four pivotal virtues.  A good soul is wise, in having good judgment whereby reason rules; it is courageous in that its spirited part is ready, willing, and able to fight for its convictions in the face of fear; and it is temperate or moderate, harmoniously integrated because all of its parts, especially its dangerous appetitive desires, agree that it should be always under the command of reason.  And, again, what is left that is essential is justice, whereby each part of the soul does the work intended by nature, none of them interfering with the functioning of any other parts.  We are also told in passing that, corresponding to these four pivotal virtues of the moral life, there are four pivotal vices, foolishness, cowardice, self-indulgence, and injustice.  One crucial question remains unanswered:  can we show that justice, thus understood, is better than injustice in itself and not merely for its likely consequences?  The answer is that, of course, we can because justice is the health of the soul.  Just as health is intrinsically and not just instrumentally good, so is justice; injustice is a disease—bad and to be avoided even if it isn’t yet having any undesirable consequences, even if nobody is aware of it (ibid., pp. 43, 102-121; 368d, 427d-445b; it can readily be inferred that this conception of justice is non-egalitarian; but, to see this point made explicitly, see Laws , pp. 229-230; 756-757).

Now let us quickly see how Plato applies this theory of justice to a particular social issue, before briefly considering the theory critically.  In a remarkably progressive passage in Book V of his Republic , Plato argues for equal opportunity for women.  He holds that, even though women tend to be physically weaker than men, this should not prove an insuperable barrier to their being educated for the same socio-political functions as men, including those of the top echelons of leadership responsibility.  While the body has a gender, it is the soul that is virtuous or vicious.  Despite their different roles in procreation, child-bearing, giving birth, and nursing babies, there is no reason, in principle, why a woman should not be as intelligent and virtuous—including as just—as men, if properly trained.  As much as possible, men and women should share the workload in common ( Republic , pp. 125-131; 451d-457d).  We should note, however, that the rationale is the common good of the community rather than any appeal to what we might consider women’s rights.  Nevertheless, many of us today are sympathetic to this application of justice in support of a view that would not become popular for another two millennia.

What of Plato’s theory of justice itself?  The negative part of it—his critique of inadequate views of justice—is a masterful series of arguments against attempts to reduce justice to a couple of simplistic rules (Cephalus), to treating people merely in accord with how we feel about them (Polemarchus), and to the power-politics mentality of exploiting them for our own selfish purposes (Thrasymachus).  All of these views of a just person or society introduce the sort of relativism and/or subjectivism we have identified with the Sophists.  Thus, in refuting them, Plato, in effect, is refuting the Sophists.  However, after the big buildup, the positive part—what he himself maintains justice is—turns out to be a letdown.  His conception of justice reduces it to order.  While some objective sense of order is relevant to justice, this does not adequately capture the idea of respecting all persons, individually and collectively, as free rational agents.  The analogy between the state and the soul is far too fragile to support the claim that they must agree in each having three “parts.”  The process-of-elimination approach to determining the nature of justice only works if those four virtues exhaust the list of what is essential here.  But do they?  What, for example, of the Christian virtue of love or the secular virtue of benevolence?  Finally, the argument from analogy, showing that justice must be intrinsically, and not merely instrumentally, valuable (because it is like the combination good of health) proves, on critical consideration, to fail.  Plato’s theory is far more impressive than the impressionistic view of the Sophists; and it would prove extremely influential in advocating justice as an objective, disinterested value.  Nevertheless, one cannot help hoping that a more cogent theory might yet be developed.

b. Aristotle

After working with Plato at his Academy for a couple of decades, Aristotle was understandably most influenced by his teacher, also adopting, for example, a virtue theory of ethics.  Yet part of Aristotle’s greatness stems from his capacity for critical appropriation, and he became arguably Plato’s most able critic as well as his most famous follower in wanting to develop a credible alternative to Sophism.  Book V of his great Nicomachean Ethics deals in considerable depth with the moral and political virtue of justice.  It begins vacuously enough with the circular claim that it is the condition that renders us just agents inclined to desire and practice justice.  But his analysis soon becomes more illuminating when he specifies it in terms of what is lawful and fair.  What is in accordance with the law of a state is thought to be conducive to the common good and/or to that of its rulers.  In general, citizens should obey such law in order to be just.  The problem is that civil law can itself be unjust in the sense of being unfair to some, so that we need to consider special justice as a function of fairness.  He analyzes this into two sorts:  distributive justice involves dividing benefits and burdens fairly among members of a community, while corrective justice requires us, in some circumstances, to try to restore a fair balance in interpersonal relations where it has been lost.  If a member of a community has been unfairly benefited or burdened with more or less than is deserved in the way of social distributions, then corrective justice can be required, as, for example, by a court of law.  Notice that Aristotle is no more an egalitarian than Plato was—while a sort of social reciprocity may be needed, it must be of a proportional sort rather than equal.  Like all moral virtues, for Aristotle, justice is a rational mean between bad extremes.  Proportional equality or equity involves the “intermediate” position between someone’s unfairly getting “less” than is deserved and unfairly getting “more” at another’s expense.  The “mean” of justice lies between the vices of getting too much and getting too little, relative to what one deserves, these being two opposite types of injustice, one of “disproportionate excess,” the other of disproportionate “deficiency” ( Nicomachean , pp. 67-74, 76; 1129a-1132b, 1134a).

Political justice, of both the lawful and the fair sort, is held to apply only to those who are citizens of a political community (a polis ) by virtue of being “free and either proportionately or numerically equal,” those whose interpersonal relations are governed by the rule of law, for law is a prerequisite of political justice and injustice.  But, since individuals tend to be selfishly biased, the law should be a product of reason rather than of particular rulers.  Aristotle is prepared to distinguish between what is naturally just and unjust, on the one hand, such as whom one may legitimately kill, and what is merely conventionally just or unjust, on the other, such as a particular system of taxation for some particular society.  But the Sophists are wrong to suggest that all political justice is the artificial result of legal convention and to discount all universal natural justice (ibid., pp. 77-78; 1134a-1135a; cf. Rhetoric , pp. 105-106; 1374a-b).  What is allegedly at stake here is our developing a moral virtue that is essential to the well-being of society, as well as to the flourishing of any human being.  Another valuable dimension of Aristotle’s discussion here is his treatment of the relationship between justice and decency, for sometimes following the letter of the law would violate fairness or reasonable equity.  A decent person might selfishly benefit from being a stickler regarding following the law exactly but decide to take less or give more for the sake of the common good.  In this way, decency can correct the limitations of the law and represents a higher form of justice ( Nicomachean , pp. 83-84; 1137a-1138a).

In his Politics , Aristotle further considers political justice and its relation to equality.  We can admit that the former involves the latter but must carefully specify by maintaining that justice involves equality “not for everyone, only for equals .”  He agrees with Plato that political democracy is intrinsically unjust because, by its very nature, it tries to treat unequals as if they were equals.  Justice rather requires inequality for people who are unequal .  But, then, oligarchy is also intrinsically unjust insofar as it involves treating equals as unequal because of some contingent disparity, of birth, wealth, etc.  Rather, those in a just political society who contribute the most to the common good will receive a larger share, because they thus exhibit more political virtue, than those who are inferior in that respect; it would be simply wrong, from the perspective of political justice, for them to receive equal shares.  Thus political justice must be viewed as a function of the common good of a community.  It is the attempt to specify the equality or inequality among people, he admits, that constitutes a key “problem” of “political philosophy.”  He thinks we can all readily agree that political justice requires “proportional” rather than numerical equality.  But inferiors have a vested interest in thinking that those who are equal in some respect should be equal in all respects, while superiors are biased, in the opposite direction, to imagine that those who are unequal in some way should be unequal in all ways.  Thus, for instance, those who are equally citizens are not necessarily equal in political virtue, and those who are financially richer are not necessarily morally or mentally superior.  What is relevant here is “equality according to merit,” though Aristotle cannot precisely specify what, exactly, counts as merit, for how much it must count, who is to measure it, and by what standard.  All he can suggest, for example in some of his comments on the desirable aristocratic government, is that it must involve moral and intellectual virtue ( Politics , pp. 79, 81, 86, 134, 136, 151, 153; 1280a, 1281a, 1282b, 1301a-1302a, 1307a, 1308a).

Let us now consider how Aristotle applies his own theory of justice to the social problem of alleged superiors and inferiors, before attempting a brief critique of that theory.  While Plato accepted slavery as a legitimate social institution but argued for equal opportunity for women, in his Politics , Aristotle accepts sexual inequality while actively defending slavery.  Anyone who is inferior intellectually and morally is properly socio-politically inferior in a well-ordered polis .  A human being can be naturally autonomous or not, “a natural slave” being defective in rationality and morality, and thus naturally fit to belong to a superior; such a human can rightly be regarded as “a piece of property,” or another person’s “tool for action.”  Given natural human inequality, it is allegedly inappropriate that all should rule or share in ruling.  Aristotle holds that some are marked as superior and fit to rule from birth, while others are inferior and marked from birth to be ruled by others.  This supposedly applies not only to ethnic groups, but also to the genders, and he unequivocally asserts that males are “naturally superior” and females “naturally inferior,” the former being fit to rule and the latter to be ruled.  The claim is that it is naturally better for women themselves that they be ruled by men, as it is better for “natural slaves” that they should be ruled by those who are “naturally free.”  Now Aristotle does argue only for natural slavery.  It was the custom (notice the distinction, used here, between custom and nature) in antiquity to make slaves of conquered enemies who become prisoners of war.  But Aristotle (like Plato) believes that Greeks are born for free and rational self-rule, unlike non-Greeks (“barbarians”), who are naturally inferior and incapable of it.  So the fact that a human being is defeated or captured is no assurance that he is fit for slavery, as an unjust war may have been imposed on a nobler society by a more primitive one.  While granting that Greeks and non-Greeks, as well as men and women, are all truly human, Aristotle justifies the alleged inequality among them based on what he calls the “deliberative” capacity of their rational souls.  The natural slave’s rational soul supposedly lacks this, a woman has it but it lacks the authority for her to be autonomous, a (free male) child has it in some developmental stage, and a naturally superior free male has it developed and available for governance (ibid., pp. 7-11, 23; 1254a-1255a, 1260a).

This application creates a helpful path to a critique of Aristotle’s theory of justice.  If we feel that it is unjust to discriminate against people merely on account of their gender and/or ethnic origin, as philosophers, we try to identify the rational root of the problem.  If our moral intuitions are correct against Aristotle (and some would even call his views here sexist and racist), he may be mistaken about a matter of fact or about a value judgment or both.  Surely he is wrong about all women and non-Greeks, as such, being essentially inferior to Greek males in relevant ways, for cultural history has demonstrated that, when given opportunities, women and non-Greeks have shown themselves to be significantly equal.  But it appears that Aristotle may also have been wrong in leaping from the factual claim of inequality to the value judgment that it is therefore right that inferiors ought to be socially, legally, politically, and economically subordinate—like Plato and others of his culture (for which he is an apologist here), Aristotle seems to have no conception of human rights as such.  Like Plato, he is arguing for an objective theory of personal and social justice as a preferable alternative to the relativistic one of the Sophists.  Even though there is something attractive about Aristotle’s empirical (as opposed to Plato’s idealistic) approach to justice, it condemns him to the dubious position of needing to derive claims about how things ought to be from factual claims about the way things actually are.  It also leaves Aristotle with little viable means of establishing a universal perspective that will respect the equal dignity of all humans, as such.  Thus his theory, like Plato’s, fails adequately to respect all persons as free, rational agents.  They were so focused on the ways in which people are un equal, that they could not appreciate any fundamental moral equality that might provide a platform for natural human rights.

2. Medieval Christianity

When Christian thinkers sought to develop their own philosophies in the middle ages (“medieval” meaning the middle ages and “middle” in the sense of being between antiquity and modernity), they found precious basic building-blocks in ancient thought.  This included such important post-Aristotelians as the enormously influential Roman eclectic Cicero, such prominent Stoics as Marcus Aurelius (a Roman emperor) and Epictetus (a Greek slave of the Romans), and neo-Platonists like Plotinus.  But the two dominant paths that medieval philosophy would follow for its roughly thousand year history had been blazed by Plato and Aristotle.  More specifically, Augustine uses Platonic (and neo-Platonic) philosophy to the extent that he can reconcile it with Christian thought; Aquinas, many centuries later, develops a great synthesis of Christian thought (including that of Augustine) and Aristotelian philosophy.  A great difference, however, between their philosophies and those of Hellenic thinkers such as Plato and Aristotle stems from the commitment of these Christians to the authority of the Hebrew and Christian scriptures.  Aquinas would later agree with Augustine (who is accepting the mandate of Isaiah 7:9) that the quest for philosophical understanding should begin with belief in religious traditions ( Choice , pp. 3, 32).  Both the Old Testament and the New Testament call for just behavior on the part of righteous people, with injustice being a sin against God’s law, the references being too numerous to cite (but see Job 9:2, Proverbs 4:18, Proverbs 10:6-7, Ecclesiastes 7:20, Matthew 5:45, Philippians 4:8, and Hebrews 12:23).  The claim that God’s justice will prevail in the form of divine judgment is both a promise for the just and a threat for the unjust.  Righteousness is identified with mercy as well as with justice (e.g., Micah 6:8 and Matthew 5:7) and involves our relationship with God as well as with fellow humans.  The ten commandments of the Old Testament (Exodus 20:1-17) are prescriptions regarding how the righteous are to relate to God as well as to one another.  In the New Testament, Jesus of Nazareth interprets how the righteous are to live (Matthew 22:36-40) in terms of love of both God and their neighbors; the concept of one’s neighbor is meant to extend even to strangers, as is illustrated in the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:29-37).  In the Beatitudes beginning the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus expands on this gospel of love by advocating that his followers go beyond the duties of justice to behave with compassion in certain supererogatory ways (Matthew 5:3-12).  All of this scriptural tradition essentially influenced medieval thinkers such as Augustine and Aquinas in a way that distinguishes them from ancient Greek philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle.

a. Augustine

Aurelius Augustine was born and raised in the Roman province of North Africa; during his life, he experienced the injustices, the corruption, and the erosion of the Roman Empire.  This personal experience, in dialectical tension with the ideals of Christianity, provided him with a dramatic backdrop for his religious axiology.  Philosophically, he was greatly influenced by such neo-Platonists as Plotinus.  His Christian Platonism is evident in his philosophical dialogue On Free Choice of the Will , in which he embraces Plato’s view of four central moral virtues (which came to be called “cardinal,” from the Latin word for hinges, these being metaphorically imaginable as the four hinges on which the door of morality pivots).  These are prudence (substituted for wisdom), fortitude or courage, temperance, and justice.  His conception of justice is the familiar one of “the virtue by which all people are given their due.”  But this is connected to something new and distinctly Christian—the distinction between the temporal law, such as the law of the state, and the eternal, divine law of God.  The eternal law establishes the order of God’s divine providence.  And, since all temporal or human law must be consistent with God’s eternal law, Augustine can draw the striking conclusion that, strictly speaking, “an unjust law is no law at all,” an oxymoron ( Choice , pp. 20, 11, 8; cf. Religion , p. 89, for an analysis of justice that relates it to love).  Thus a civil law of the state that violates God’s eternal law is not morally binding and can be legitimately disobeyed in good conscience.  This was to have a profound and ongoing influence on Christian ethics.

In his masterpiece, The City of God , Augustine draws the dramatic conclusion from this position that the Roman Empire was never a truly just political society.  He expresses his disgust over its long history of “revolting injustice.”  Rome was always a pagan, earthly city, and “true justice” can allegedly only be found in a Christian “city of God.”  The just, rather than the powerful, should rule for the common good, rather than serving their own self-interest.  He strikingly compares unjust societies, based on might rather than on right, to “gangs of criminals on a large scale,” for, without justice, a kingdom or empire is merely ruled by the arbitrary fiat of some leader(s).  A genuinely just society must be based on Christian love, its peaceful order established by the following of two basic rules—that people harm nobody and that they should try to help everyone to the extent that they can do so ( City , pp. 75, 67, 75, 138-139, 873).

Despite his Christian commitment to love and peace, Augustine is not a pacifist and can support “just wars” as morally permissible and even as morally obligatory.  Every war aims at the order of some sort of established peace; while an unjust war aims to establish an unjust peace of domination, a just war aims to establish a “just peace.”  He agrees with Cicero that a just war must be defensive rather than aggressive (ibid., pp. 861-862, 866, 868-869, 1031).  In a letter (# 138) to Marcellinus, Augustine uses scripture to deny that Christian doctrine is committed to pacifism, though wars should be waged, when necessary, with a benevolent love for the enemy.  In a letter (# 189) to Boniface, he maintains that godly, righteous people can serve in the military, again citing scripture to support his position.  He repeats the view that a just war should aim at establishing a lasting and just peace and holds that one must keep faith with both one’s allies and one’s enemies, even in the awful heat of warfare.  Augustine’s most important treatment of the just war theory is contained in his writing Against Faustus the Manichean , where he analyzes the evils of war in terms of the desire to harm others, the lust for revenge and cruelty, and the wish to dominate other people.  In addition to the condition that a just war must aim at establishing a just and lasting peace, a second condition is that it must be declared by a leader or body of leaders, with the “authority” to do so, after deliberating that it is justified.  Again Augustine makes it clear that he is no pacifist ( Political , pp. 209, 219-223).

While this is a very valuable application of his theory of justice, this doctrine of the just war standing the test of time to this very day, the general theory on which it is based is more problematic.  The unoriginal (and uninspired) conception of justice as giving others their due had already become familiar to the point of being trite.  It remains vulnerable to the serious problems of vagueness already considered:  what is the relevant criterion whereby it should be determined who deserves what, and who is fit to make such a judgment?  But, also, Augustine should have an advantage over the ancient Greeks in arriving at a theory of justice based on universal equality on account of the Christian doctrine (not to mention because of the influences of Cicero, the Stoics, and Plotinus) that all humans are equally children of God.  Unfortunately, his zealous Christian evangelism leads him to identify justice itself, in a divisive, intolerant, polemical way, with the Christian church’s idea of what God requires, so that only a Christian society can possibly qualify as just, as if a just political society would need to be a theocracy.  Thus, while he has some sense of some moral or spiritual equality among humans, it does not issue in equal respect for all persons as free, rational agents, allowing him, for example, to accept the institution of slavery as a just punishment for sin, despite the belief that God originally created humans as naturally free, because of the idea that we have all been corrupted by original sin ( City , pp. 874-875).

As Augustine is arguably the greatest Christian Platonist, so Thomas Aquinas, from what is now Italy, is the greatest Christian Aristotelian.  Nevertheless, as we shall see, his theory of justice is also quite compatible with Augustine’s.  Aquinas discusses the same four cardinal moral virtues, including that of justice, in his masterpiece, the multi-volume Summa Theologica .  No more a socio-political egalitarian than Plato, Aristotle, or Augustine, he analyzes it as calling for proportional equality, or equity, rather than any sort of strict numerical equality, and as a function of natural right rather than of positive law.  Natural right ultimately stems from the eternal, immutable will of God, who created the world and governs it with divine providence.  Natural justice must always take precedence over the contingent agreements of our human conventions.  Human law must never contravene natural law, which is reason’s way of understanding God’s eternal law.  He offers us an Aristotelian definition, maintaining that “justice is a habit whereby a man renders to each one his due by a constant and perpetual will.”  As a follower of Aristotle, he defines concepts in terms of genus and species.  In this case, the general category to which justice belongs is that it is a moral habit of a virtuous character.  What specifically distinguishes it from other moral virtues is that by justice, a person is consistently committed to respecting the rights of others over time.  Strictly speaking, the virtue of justice always concerns interpersonal relations, so that it is only metaphorically that we can speak of a person being just to himself.  In addition to legal justice, whereby a person is committed to serving the “common good” of the entire community, there is “particular justice,” which requires that we treat individuals in certain ways.  Justice is a rational mean between the vicious extremes of deficiency and excess, having to do with our external actions regarding others.  Like many of his predecessors, Aquinas considers justice to be preeminent among the moral virtues.  He agrees with Aristotle in analyzing particular justice into two types, which he calls “distributive” and “commutative”; the former governs the proportional distribution of common goods, while the latter concerns the reciprocal dealings between individuals in their voluntary transactions ( Law , pp. 137, 139, 145, 147, 155, 160, 163, 165).

Aquinas applies this theory of justice to many social problems.  He maintains that natural law gives us the right to own private property.  Given this natural right, theft (surreptitiously stealing another’s property) and robbery (taking it openly by force or the threat of violence) must be unjust, although an exception can arise if the thief and his family are starving in an environment of plenty, in which case, stealing is justified and, strictly speaking, not theft or robbery at all.  Secondly, Aquinas refines the Augustinian just war theory by articulating three conditions that must jointly be met in order for the waging of war to be just:  (a) it must be declared by a leader with socio-political authority; (b) it must be declared for a “just cause,” in that the people attacked must be at fault and thus deserve it; and (c) those going to war must intend good and the avoidance of evil.  It is not justifiable deliberately to slay innocent noncombatants.  It is legitimate to kill another in self-defense, though one’s intention should be that of saving oneself, the taking of the other’s life merely being the necessary means to that good end (this, by the way, is the source of what later evolves into the moral principle of “double effect”).  Even acting in self-defense must be done in reasonable proportion to the situation, so that it is wrong to employ more force than is necessary to stop aggression.  Even killing another unintentionally can be unjust if done in the course of committing another crime or through criminal negligence.  Thirdly, while Aquinas thinks we should tolerate the religious beliefs of those who have never been Christians, so that it would be unjust to persecute them, he thinks it just to use force against heretics who adhered to but then rejected orthodox Christianity, even to the point of hurting them, as in the Inquisition, for the good of their own souls.  In an extreme case of recalcitrant heretics who will not be persuaded to return to the truth of Christianity, it is allegedly just that they should be “exterminated” by execution rather than being allowed to corrupt other Christians by espousing their heterodox religious views.  Fourth, like Augustine, Aquinas accepts slavery, so long as no Christian is the slave of a non-Christian (ibid., pp. 178-183, 186, 221, 224, 226, 228, 250, 256, 253), and considers it just that women should be politically and economically “subject” to men.  Although he considers women to be fully human, he agrees with Aristotle that they are “defective and misbegotten,” the consequence allegedly being inferior rational discretion ( Summa , pp. 466-467).

From a critical perspective, his general theory of justice is, by now, quite familiar, a sort of blend of Aristotle’s and Augustine’s, and marked by the same flaws as theirs.  His applications of the theory can be regarded as indicative of its problematic character:  (a) given the assumption of a right to own private property, his discussion of the injustices of theft and robbery seems quite reasonable; (b) assuming that we have a right to self-defense, his analysis of the legitimacy of killing in a just war does also; (c) his attempted defense of the persecution of religious heretics, even unto death, invites suspicions of dogmatic, intolerant fanaticism on his part; and (d) his acceptance of slavery and the political and economic subjection of women as just is indicative of an empirical orientation that is too uncritically accepting of the status quo .  Here again the Christian belief that all humans are personal creatures of a loving God is vitiated by an insufficient commitment to the implications of that, regarding socio-political equality, so that only some humans are fully respected as free, rational agents.  The rationalistic theories of Plato and Augustine and the classical empirical theories of Aristotle and Aquinas all leave us hoping that preferable alternatives might be forthcoming.

3. Early Modernity

Although only half as much time elapses between Aquinas and Hobbes as did between Augustine and Aquinas, from the perspective of intellectual history, the period of modernism represents a staggering sea-change.  We have neither the time nor the space to consider the complex causal nexus that explains this fact; but, for our purposes, suffice it to say that the Protestant Reformation, the revolution of the new science, and the progressive willingness publicly to challenge authority (both political and religious) converge to generate a strikingly different philosophical mentality in the seventeenth century.  In the previous century, the Protestant Reformation shattered the hegemony of the Roman Catholic Church, so that thinkers need not feel so constrained to adhere to established orthodoxy.  The naturalistic worldview of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries that eventuated in an empirical and experimental (non-dogmatic) methodology in both natural and political science set an example for philosophers.  Thinkers of the modern era became increasingly comfortable breaking from the mainstream to pursue their own independent reasoning.  Although the influence of great ancient philosophers like Plato and Aristotle and of great medieval thinkers such as Augustine and Aquinas would persist, there was no returning to their bygone perspectives.  This vitally affects moral and political theory, in general, and views on justice, in particular.  As we shall see in this section, views of justice as relative to human needs and interests became prominent as they had not been for a couple of millennia.  This will locate Hobbes and Hume closer to the Sophists than had been fashionable since pre-Socratic times in philosophy, regarding justice as a social construct.

Whereas Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas all offer accounts of justice that represent alternatives to Sophism, Thomas Hobbes, the English radical empiricist, can be seen as resurrecting the Sophist view that we can have no objective knowledge of it as a moral or political absolute value.  His radical empiricism does not allow him to claim to know anything not grounded in concrete sense experience.  This leads him in Leviathan , his masterpiece, to conclude that anything real must be material or corporeal in nature, that body is the one and only sort of reality; this is the philosophical position of materialistic monism, which rules out the possibility of any spiritual substance.  On this view, “ a man is a living body ,” only different in kind from other animals, but with no purely spiritual soul separating him from the beasts.  Like other animals, man is driven by instinct and appetite, his reason being a capacity of his brain for calculating means to desirable ends.  Another controversial claim here is that all actions, including all human actions, are causally determined to occur as they do by the complex of their antecedent conditions; this is causal determinism.  What we consider voluntary actions are simply those we perform in which the will plays a significant causal role, human freedom amounting to nothing more exalted than the absence of external restraints.  Like other animals, we are always fundamentally motivated by a survival instinct and ultimately driven by self-interest in all of our voluntary actions; this is psychological egoism .  It is controversial whether he also holds that self-interest should always be our fundamental motivation, which is ethical egoism.  In his most famous Chapter XIII, Hobbes paints a dramatic and disturbing portrait of what human life would be like in a state of nature—that is, beyond the conventional order of civil society.  We would be rationally distrustful of one another, inclined to be anti-social, viewing others as threats to our own satisfaction and well-being.  Interpersonal antagonism would be natural; and, since there would exist no moral distinctions between right and wrong, just and unjust, violent force and fraudulent deception would be desirable virtues rather than objectionable vices.  In short, this would be a state of “war of every man against every man,” a condition in which we could not reasonably expect to survive for long or to enjoy any quality of life for as long as we did.  We are smart enough to realize that this would be a condition in which, as Hobbes famously writes, “the life of man” would inevitably be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”  Fortunately, our natural passions of fear, desire, and hope motivate us to use reason to calculate how we might escape this hellish state.  Reason discovers a couple of basic laws of nature, indicating how we should prudently behave if we are to have any reasonable opportunity to survive, let alone to thrive.  The first of these is double-sided:  the positive side holds that we should try to establish peace with others, for our own selfish good, if we can; the negative side holds that, if we cannot do that, then we should do whatever it takes to destroy whoever might be a threat to our interests.  The second law of nature maintains that, in order to achieve peace with others, we must be willing to give up our right to harm them, so long as they agree to reciprocate by renouncing their right to harm us.  This “mutual transferring of right,” established by reciprocal agreement, is the so-called social contract that constitutes the basis of civil society; and the agreement can be made either explicitly or implicitly ( Leviathan , pp. 261-262, 459-460, 79, 136, 82, 95, 74-78, 80-82; for comparable material, see Elements , pp. 78-84, 103-114, as well as Citizen , pp. 109-119, 123-124).

What is conspicuously missing here is any sense of natural justice or injustice.  In the state of nature, all moral values are strictly relative to our desires:  whatever seems likely to satisfy our desires appears “good” to us, and whatever seems likely to frustrate our desires we regard as “evil.”  It’s all relative to what we imaginatively associate with our own appetites and aversions.  But as we move from this state of nature to the state of civil society by means of the social contract, we create the rules of justice by means of the agreements we strike with one another.  Prior to the conventions of the contract, we were morally free to try to do whatever we wished.  But when a covenant is made, then to break it is unjust ; and the definition of injustice is no other than the not performance of covenant .  What is not unjust, is just in civil society.  This turns out to be the third law of nature, that, in the name of justice, we must try to keep our agreements.  In civil society, we may justly do anything we have not, at least implicitly, committed ourselves not to do.  A just person typically does just actions, though committing one or a few unjust actions does not automatically render that person unjust, especially if the unjust behavior stems from an error or sudden passion; on the other hand, a person who is typically inclined to commit unjust actions is a guilty person.  Still, if we are as selfishly motivated by our own desires as Hobbes maintains, why should we not break our word and voluntarily commit injustice, if doing so is likely to pay off for us and we imagine we might get away with it (remember the problem posed by Glaucon with the story of the ring of Gyges)?  Clearly one more element is needed to prevent the quick disintegration of the rules of justice so artificially constructed by interpersonal agreement.  This is the power of sovereign authority.  We need laws codifying the rules of justice; and they must be so vigilantly and relentlessly enforced by absolute political power that nobody in his right mind would dare to try to violate them.  People simply cannot be trusted to honor their social commitments without being forced to do so, since “covenants without the sword are but words, and of no strength to secure a man at all.”  In other words, we must sacrifice a great deal of our natural liberty to achieve the sort of security without which life is hardly worth living.  In civil society, our freedom is relative to the lack of specified obligations, what Hobbes calls “the silence of the law.”  If we worry that this invests too much power in the government, which may abuse that power and excessively trample on our freedom, the (cynical) response is that this is preferable to the chaos of the state of nature or to the horrors of civil war ( Leviathan , pp. 28-29, 89, 93, 106, 109, 143, 117; for comparable material, see Elements , pp. 88-89, Citizen , pp. 136-140, and Common , p. 34).  One of the most crucial problems of political philosophy is where to strike the balance between personal liberty and public order; Hobbes is, perhaps, more willing than most of us to give up a great deal of the former in order to secure the latter.

As we have with earlier thinkers, let us see how Hobbes applies this theory of justice, as a prelude to evaluating it critically.  He compares the laws of civil society to “artificial chains” binding us to obey the sovereign authority of the state in the name of justice.  The third law of nature, the law of justice, obliges us to obey the “ positive ” laws of the state.  Any deliberate violation of civil law is a “crime.”  Now the social problem to be considered is that of criminal punishment.  This deliberately inflicts some sort of “evil” on an alleged criminal for violating civil law.  Its rationale is to enforce obedience to the law itself and, thus, to promote security and public order.  Hobbes lays down various conditions that must be met in order for such an infliction of evil to qualify as legitimate “punishment,” including that no retroactive punishment is justifiable.  He also analyzes five sorts of criminal punishment—“ corporal , or pecuniary , or ignominy , or imprisonment , or exile ,” allowing for a combination of them; he also specifies that the corporal sort can be capital punishment.  It would be wrong for the state deliberately to punish a member of civil society believed to be innocent; indeed, strictly speaking, it would not even qualify as “punishment,” as it fails to meet an essential part of the definition.  The severity of punishment should be relative to the severity of the crime involved, since its rationale is to deter future violations of civil law ( Leviathan , pp. 138, 173, 175, 185, 190, 203-208, 230; see, also, Elements, pp. 177-182, and Citizen , pp. 271-279; near the end of his verse autobiography— Elements , p. 264—Hobbes writes, “Justice I Teach, and Justice Reverence”).

While this is a decent consequentialist theory of crime and punishment, the more general view of justice from which it is derived is far more problematic.  It does stand in sharp contrast to the theories of Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas.  It does revive something like the Sophist theory to which they were all advocating alternatives.  And it does reflect the naturalistic approach represented by the new science.  However, all the foundational elements supporting it are quite dubious:  the radical empiricism, the materialism, the determinism, the egoism, the moral relativism, and the narrow conception of human reason.  Without these props, this theory of justice as artificially constructed by us and purely a function of our interpersonal agreements seems entirely arbitrary.  But in addition to its being insufficiently justified, this theory of justice would justify too much.  For example, what would prevent its involving a justification of slavery, if the alternative for the slaves were death as enemies in a state of nature?  Even apart from the issue of slavery, in the absence of any substantive human rights, minorities in civil society might be denied any set of civil liberties, such as the right to adopt religious practices to which they feel called in conscience.  Hobbes’s conception of justice is reductionistic, reducing it to conventional agreements that seem skewed to sacrifice too much liberty on the altar of law and order.

As a transition between Hobbes and Hume, brief mention can be made of John Locke, the most important political philosopher between them.  (The reason he is not being considered at length here is that he does not offer a distinctive general theory of justice.)  In his masterful Second Treatise of Government , Locke describes a state of nature governed by God’s law but insecure in that there is no mechanism for enforcing it, when the natural rights of property—comprising one’s life, liberty, and estates—are violated.  In order to protect such property rights, people agree to a social contract that moves them from that state of nature to a state of political society, with government established to enforce the law.  Another great social contract theorist between Hobbes and Hume who is worth mentioning here (again he gives us no distinctive theory of justice) is Jean-Jacques Rousseau.  In The Social Contract , he maintains that, in a well-ordered society, the general will (rather than the will of any individual or group of individuals) must prevail.  True freedom in society requires following the general will, and those who do not choose to do so can legitimately be forced to do so.  A human being is allegedly so transformed by the move from the state of nature to that of civil society as to become capable of such genuine freedom as will allow each citizen to consent to all the laws out of deference to the common good.   David Hume, an eighteenth-century Scottish thinker, who is very influenced by Locke’s focus on property while rejecting the social contract theory of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, is an interesting philosopher to consider in relation to Hobbes.  Like Hobbes, Hume is a radical empiricist and a determinist who is skeptical of justice as an objective, absolute virtue.  But Hume does not explicitly embrace materialism, is not a psychological or ethical egoist, and famously attacks the social contract theory’s account of moral and political obligation on both historical grounds (there is no evidence for it, and history shows that force rather than consent has been the basis of government) and philosophical grounds (even if our ancestors had given their consent, that would not be binding on us, and utility is a more plausible explanation of submission than genuine agreement) alike ( Essays, pp. 186-201).  In the third section of his Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals , Hume argues that “public utility is the sole origin of justice.”  To place that claim in context, we can note that, like Hobbes, Hume sees all values, including that of justice, as derived from our passions rather than (as Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas thought) from reason.  Any virtue, he maintains, is desirable in that it provides us with the pleasant feeling of approval; and any vice, including that of injustice, is undesirable in that it provides us with the painful sense of disapproval.  In order to qualify as a virtue, a quality must be “ useful or agreeable to the person himself or to others .”  It is possible for some virtues to be rich enough to fit appropriately in more than one of these four categories (for example, benevolence seems to be useful and agreeable to both the benevolent person and to others); but justice is purportedly a virtue only because it is useful to others, as members of society.  Hume offers us a unique and fascinating argument to prove his point.  He imagines four hypothetical scenarios, in which either human nature would be radically different (utterly altruistic or brutally selfish) or our environment would be so (with everything we desire constantly and abundantly available or so destitute that hardly anyone could survive), allegedly showing that, in each of them, justice would not be a virtue at all.  His conclusion is that justice is only a virtue because, relative to reality, which is intermediate among these extremes, it is beneficial to us as members of society.  He also refuses to identify justice with “ perfect equality,” maintaining that the ideal of egalitarianism is both “ impracticable ” and “extremely pernicious to human society.”  For Hume, the rules of justice essentially involve protecting private property, although property rights are not absolute and may be abridged in extreme cases where “public safety” and the common good require it.  Even international relations normally require that “rules of justice” be observed for mutual advantage, although public utility can also require that they should be suspended ( Enquiry , pp. 20, 85, 72, 21-25, 28-35; see also Essays , pp. 20, 202).  Though different from Hobbes’s theory, this one also leans towards the Sophist view of justice as conventional and relative.

In his masterpiece, A Treatise of Human Nature , Hume makes the striking claim, “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions,” which rules out all forms of ethical rationalism.  He also makes a remarkable distinction between descriptive language regarding what “ is , and is not ,” on the one hand, and prescriptive language concerning what “ ought , or ought not ” to be, on the other, challenging the possibility of ever justifying value claims by means of any factual ones, of logically inferring what should be from what is.  The second part of Book 3 of Hume’s Treatise deals extensively with justice.  Here he calls it an “ artificial ” but “not arbitrary” virtue, in that we construct it as a virtue for our own purposes, relative to our needs and circumstances, as we experience them.  It is valuable as a means to the end of social cooperation, which is mutually “advantageous.”   An especially beneficial, if unnatural, convention is respecting others’ property, which is what the rules of justice essentially require of us.  The psychological grounds of our sense of justice are a combination of “self-interest” and “sympathy” for others.  He holds a very conservative view of property rights, in that, normally, people should be allowed to keep what they already have acquired.  Indeed, justice normally comprises three principles—“ of the stability of possession, of its transference by consent, and of the performance of promises .”  He rejects the traditional definition of justice as giving others their due, because it rashly and wrongly assumes that “right and property” have prior objective reality independent of conventions of justice.  Internationally, the rules of justice assume the status of “the law of nations ,” obliging civilized governments to respect the ambassadors of other countries, to declare war prior to engaging them in battle, to refrain from using poisonous weapons against them, and so forth.  The rationale for such principles of international justice is that they reduce the horrors of war and facilitate the advantages of peace.  By respecting other societies’ possessions, leaders minimize the likelihood of war; by respecting the transference of possessions by mutual consent, they enhance the possibilities of international trade; and by keeping their promises, they create a climate for peaceful alliances.  A bit later, Hume adopts a position which, in the twentieth century, has been called a “rule utilitarian” view of justice, writing that, though individual acts of justice might be contrary to public utility, they ought to be performed if they are conducive to “a general scheme or system” of conduct that benefits society as a whole ( Treatise , pp. 266, 302, 311, 307, 312, 315, 320-321, 323, 337-338, 362-363, 370-371).  Yet the rules of justice that are normally conducive to public utility are never absolute and can be legitimately contravened where following them would seem to do more harm than good to our society.  He applies this view to the issue of civil disobedience, which is normally unjust because it threatens “public utility” but can be justified as a last resort “in extraordinary circumstances” when that same public utility is in jeopardy ( Essays , pp. 202-204).  Whether that is or is not the case in specific circumstances becomes a judgment call.

Hume is important here because of a convergence of several factors.  First, like the Sophists and Hobbes, he makes justice a social construct that is relative to human needs and interests.  Second, like Hobbes, he associates it fundamentally with human passions rather than with reason.  Third, the virtue of justice and the rules of justice are essentially connected to the protection of private property.  And, fourth, he considers public utility to be the sole basis of justice.  This theory would prove extremely influential, in that Kant will take issue with it, while utilitarians like Mill will build on its flexibility.  This sort of flexibility is both a strength and a weakness of Hume’s theory of justice.  While it may be attractive to allow for exceptions to the rules, this also creates a kind of instability.  Is justice merely an instrumental good, having no intrinsic value?  If that were the case, then it would make sense to say that the role of reason is simply to calculate the most effective means to our most desirable ends.  But then, assuming that our ends were sufficiently desirable, any means necessary to achieve them would presumably be justifiable—so that, morally and politically, anything goes, in principle, regardless how revolting.  Finally, notice that Hume himself, because of the empirical nature of his practical philosophy, fails to avoid the “is-ought” trap against which he so deftly warned us:  because some end is sufficiently desired, whatever means are necessary, or even most effective, to achieve it ought to be pursued.  Is this the best we can do in our pursuit of an adequate theory of justice?

4. Recent Modernity

Moving from one of the greatest philosophers of the Enlightenment to the other, we shall see that Kant will take more seriously the “is-ought” challenge than Hume himself did.  As justice is both a moral and a political virtue, helping to prescribe both a good character and right conduct, the question of how such obligations arise is crucial.  For Hume, we ought to pursue virtue (including justice) because it (allegedly) is agreeable and/or useful to do so.  But, then, what is the logical link here?  Why should we, morally speaking, act for the sake of agreeableness and utility?  For Kant, the reason we should choose to do what is right has nothing to do with good consequences.  It is merely because it is the right thing to do.  Conceding that prescriptive “ought” claims can never be logically deduced from any set of factually descriptive “is” claims, Kant will forsake the empirical approach to justice (of Hobbes and Hume) in favor of the sort of rationalistic one that will revert to seeing it as an absolute value, not to be compromised, regardless of circumstances and likely consequences.  Then we shall consider the utilitarian response to this, as developed by the philosopher who is, arguably, the greatest consequentialist of modern times, John Stuart Mill, who, as an empiricist, like Hobbes and Hume, will make what is right a function of what is good.

Immanuel Kant, an eighteenth-century German professor from East Prussia, found his rationalistic philosophical convictions profoundly challenged by Hume’s formidable skepticism (as well as being fascinated by the ideas of Rousseau).  Even though he was not convinced by it, Kant was sufficiently disturbed by it that he committed decades to trying to answer it, creating a revolutionary new philosophical system in order to do so.  This system includes, but is far from limited to, a vast, extensive practical philosophy, comprising many books and essays, including a theory of justice.  It is well known that this practical philosophy—including both his ethical theory and socio-political philosophy—is the most renowned example of deontology (from the Greek, meaning the study or science of duty).  Whereas teleological or consequentialist theories (such as those of Hobbes and Hume) see what is right as a function of and relative to good ends, a deontological theory such as Kant’s sees what is right as independent of what we conceive to be good and, thus, as potentially absolute.  Justice categorically requires a respect for the right, regardless of inconvenient or uncomfortable circumstances and regardless of desirable and undesirable consequences.  Because of the “is-ought” problem, the best way to proceed is to avoid the empirical approach that is necessarily committed to trying to derive obligations from alleged facts.

This is precisely Kant’s approach in the foundational book of his system of practical philosophy, his Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals .  He argues, in its Preface, that, since the moral law “must carry with it absolute necessity” and since empiricism only yields “contingent and uncertain” results, we must proceed by way of “pure practical reason, “ which would be, to the extent possible, “purified of everything empirical,” such as physiological, psychological, and environmental contingencies.  On this view, matters of right will be equally applicable to all persons as potentially autonomous rational agents, regardless of any contingent differences, of gender, racial or ethnic identity, socio-economic class status, and so forth.  If Kant can pull this off, it will take him further in the direction of equality of rights than any previous philosopher considered here.  In order to establish a concept of right that is independent of empirical needs, desires, and interests, Kant argues for a single fundamental principle of all duty, which he calls the “categorical imperative,” because it tells us what, as persons, we ought to do, unconditionally.  It is a test we can use to help us rationally to distinguish between right and wrong; and he offers three different formulations of it which he considers three different ways of saying the same thing:  (a) the first is a formula of universalizability, that we should try to do only what we could reasonably will should become a universal law; (b) the second is a formula of respect for all persons, that we should try always to act in such a way as to respect all persons, ourselves and all others, as intrinsically valuable “ends in themselves” and never treat any persons merely as instrumental means to other ends; and (c) the third is a “principle of autonomy,” that we, as morally autonomous rational agents, should try to act in such a way that we could be reasonably legislating for a (hypothetical) moral republic of all persons.  For the dignity of all persons, rendering them intrinsically valuable and worthy of respect, is a function of their capacity for moral autonomy.  In his Metaphysics of Morals , Kant develops his ethical system, beyond this foundation, into a doctrine of right and a doctrine of virtue.  The former comprises strict duties of justice, while the latter comprises broader duties of merit.  Obviously, it is the former category, duties we owe all other persons, regardless of circumstances and consequences, that concerns us here, justice being a matter of strict right rather than one of meritorious virtue.  At the very end of his Metaphysics of Morals , Kant briefly discusses “divine justice,” whereby God legitimately punishes people for violating their duties ( Ethical , pp. 2-3, 30-44, 36, 48, 158-161).

In his Metaphysical Elements of Justice , which constitutes the first part of his Metaphysics of Morals , Kant develops his theory of justice.  (His concept of Rechtslehre —literally, “doctrine of right”—has also been translated as “doctrine of justice” and “doctrine of law.”)  For Kant, justice is inextricably bound up with obligations with which we can rightly be required to comply. To say that we have duties of justice to other persons is to indicate that they have rights, against us, that we should perform those duties—so that duties of justice and rights are correlative.  Three conditions must be met in order that the concept of justice should apply:  (a) we must be dealing with external interpersonal behaviors; (b) it must relate to willed action and not merely to wishes, desires, and needs; and (c) the consequences intended are not morally relevant.  A person is not committing an injustice by considering stealing another’s property or in wanting to do so, but only by voluntarily taking action to appropriate it without permission; and the act is not justified no matter what good consequences may be intended.  According to Kant, there is only one innate human right possessed by all persons; that is the right freely to do what one wills, so long as that is “compatible with the freedom of everyone else in accordance with a universal law.”  Thus one person’s right freely to act cannot extend to infringing on the freedom of others or the violation of their rights.  This leads to Kant’s ultimate universal principle of justice, which is itself a categorical imperative:  “Every action is just [right] that in itself or in its maxim is such that the freedom of the will of each can coexist together with the freedom of everyone in accordance with a universal law.”  Although the use of coercive force against other persons involves an attempt to restrict their freedom, this is not necessarily unjust, if it is used to counteract their unjust abuse of freedom—for example, in self-defense or punishment or even war.  Kant approvingly invokes three ancient rules of justice:  (1) we should be honest in our dealings with others; (2) we should avoid being unjust towards others even if that requires our trying to avoid them altogether; and (3) if we cannot avoid associating with others, we should at least try to respect their rights ( Justice , pp. 29, 38, 30-31, 37; see also Lectures , pp. 211-212).

Kant distinguishes between natural or private justice, on the one hand, and civil or public justice, on the other.  He has an intricate theory of property rights, which we can only touch upon here.  We can claim, in the name of justice, to have rights to (a) physical property, such as your car, (b) the performance of a particular deed by another person, such as the auto shop keeping its agreement to try to fix your car, and (c) certain characteristics of interpersonal relationships with those under our authority, such as obedient children and respectful servants.  Someone who steals your car or the auto mechanic who has agreed to fix it and then fails to try to do so is doing you an injustice.  Children, as developing but dependent persons, have a right to support and care from their parents; but, in turn, they owe their parents obedience while under their authority.  Children are not the property of their parents and must never be treated like things or objects; and, when they have become independent of their parents, they owe them nothing more than gratitude.  Similarly, a master must respect a servant as a person.  The servant may be under contract to serve the master, but that contract cannot be permanent or legitimately involve the giving up of the servant’s personhood (in other words, one cannot justifiably enter into slavery).  While the master has authority over the servant, that must never be viewed as ownership or involve abuse.  This all concerns private or natural justice, having to do with the securing of property rights.  Next let us next consider how Kant applies his theory of justice to the problem of crime and punishment, in the area of public or civil justice, involving protective, commutative, and distributive justice, the requirements of which can be legitimately enforced by civil society.  When a person commits a crime, that involves misusing freedom to infringe the freedom of others or to violate their rights.  Thus the criminal forfeits the right to freedom and can become a legitimate prisoner of the state.  Kant considers the rule that criminals should be punished for their crimes to be “a categorical imperative,” a matter of just “retribution” not to be denied or even mitigated for utilitarian reasons.  This extends to the ultimate punishment, the death penalty:  justice requires that murderers, the most heinous criminals, should suffer capital punishment, as no lesser penalty would be just.  A third application to consider here is that of war.  This is in the international part of public justice that Kant calls “the Law of Nations.”  He adopts a non-empirical version of the social contract theory, interpreting it not as a historical fact mysteriously generating obligations but rather as a hypothetical idea of what free and equal moral agents could reasonably agree to in the way of rules of justice.  Unlike Hobbes, he does not see this as a basis for all moral duty.  It does account for the obligation we have to the state and other citizens.  But states have duties to other states, so that there is an international law of nations.  Even though different states, in the absence of international law, are in a natural condition of a state of war, as Hobbes thought, he was wrong to think that, in that state, anything rightly goes and that there is no justice.  War is bad, and we should try to minimize the need for it, although Kant is not a pacifist and can justify it for purposes of self-defense.  Kant proposes an international “league of nations” to help provide for mutual “protection against external aggression” and, thus, to discourage it and reduce the need to go to war.  Still, when war cannot be avoided, it should be declared rather than launched by means of a sneak attack; secondly, there are legitimate limits that prohibit, for example, trying to exterminate or subjugate all members of the enemy society; third, when a war is over, the winning party cannot destroy the civil freedom of the losing parties, as by enslaving them; and, fourth, certain “rights of peace” must be assured and honored for all involved.  Thus the ultimate goal of international relations and of the league of nations should be the ideal of “perpetual peace” among different states that share our planet ( Justice , pp. 41, 43, 91-95, 113, 136-141, 146, 151-158; for more on Kant’s version of the social contract theory, see Writings , pp. 73-85, and for more on his views on war and “perpetual peace,” see Writings , pp. 93-130).  Thus we see Kant applying his own theory of justice in three areas:  in the area of private law having to do with the securing of property rights, in the area of public law having to do with retributive punishment for crimes committed, and in the area of international justice concerned with war and peace.

What shall we critically say about this theory?  First, it argues for a sense of justice in terms of objective, non-arbitrary right—against, say, Hobbes and Hume.  Second, this sense of justice is of a piece with Kant’s categorical imperative, in that the rules of justice (e.g., regarding property rights, punishment, and war) are universalizable, designed to respect persons as intrinsically valuable, and conforming to the principle of autonomy.  Third, if Hume is correct in suggesting that we can never logically infer what ought to be from what actually is, then Kant’s is the only theory we have considered thus far that can pass the test.  To focus the issue, ask the question, why should we be just?  For Plato, this is the way to achieve the fulfillment of a well-ordered soul.  For Aristotle, the achievement and exercising of moral virtue is a necessary condition of human flourishing.  For Augustine and Aquinas, God’s eternal law requires that we, as God’s personal creatures, should be just, with our salvation at stake.  For Hobbes, practicing justice is required by enlightened self-interest.  For Hume, even though our being just may not benefit us directly all the time, it is conducive to public utility or the good of the society of which we are members.  But for each of these claims, we can ask, so what?  If any combination of these claims were to turn out to be correct, we could still legitimately ask why we should therefore be just.  Are we to assume that we ought to do whatever it takes to achieve a well-ordered soul or to flourish or to comply with God’s will or to serve our own self-interest or public utility?  Why?  Consider Kant’s answer:  we should try to be just because it’s the right thing to do and because it is our duty, as rational, moral agents, to try to do what is right.  Kant’s analysis of justice works well; and, given that, his applications to property rights, crime and punishment, and war and peace are also impressive.  Yet his theory is commonly rejected as too idealistic to be realistically applicable in the so-called “real world,” because it maintains that some things can be absolutely unjust and are, thus, categorically impermissible, regardless of likely consequences.  His theory as we have considered it here is a paradigmatic example of the view of justice being advocated in this article, as essentially requiring respect for persons as free, rational agents.  Yet Kant’s inflexibility in other points of application, such as in his absolute prohibition against lying to a would-be murderer in order to save innocent human life ( Ethical , pp. 162-166), his idea that women and servants are merely “passive citizens” unfit to vote, and his categorical denial of any right to resistance or revolution against oppression ( Justice , pp. 120, 124-128), is problematic here, inviting an alternative such as is represented by Mill’s utilitarianism.

Let us consider a bit of Karl Marx (and his collaborator Friedrich Engels) as a quick transition between Kant and Mill.  Kant represents the very sort of bourgeois conception of justice against which Marx and Engels protest in their call, in The Communist Manifesto, for a socialistic revolution.  Marx explains the ideal of socio-economic equality he advocates with the famous slogan that all should be required to contribute to society to the extent of their abilities and all should be allowed to receive from society in accordance with their needs.  John Stuart Mill, a nineteenth-century English philosopher, was aware of the call for a Communist revolution and advocated progressive liberal reform as an alternative path to political evolution.  Whereas Kant was the first great deontologist, Mill subscribed to the already established tradition of utilitarianism.  Although earlier British thinkers (including Hobbes and Hume) were proto-utilitarians, incorporating elements of the theory into their own worldviews, the movement, as such, is usually thought to stem from the publication of Jeremy Bentham’s Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation in 1789.  He there proposes the “ principle of utility ,” which he also later calls the “ greatest happiness ” principle, as the desirable basis for individual and collective decision-making:  “By the principle of utility is meant that principle which approves or disapproves of every action whatsoever, according to the tendency which it appears to have to augment or diminish the happiness of the party whose interest is in question.”  That single sentence establishes the ultimate criterion for utilitarian reasoning and the root of a great movement.  A famous lawyer named John Austin, under whom Mill studied, wrote a book of jurisprudence based on Bentham’s “principle of general utility.”  Mill’s father, James Mill, was a friend and disciple of Bentham and educated his only son also to be a utilitarian.  Near the end of his life, Mill observed that it was the closest thing to a religion in which his father raised him.  And, if he was not the founder of this secular religion, he clearly became its most effective evangelist.  In Utilitarianism , his own great essay in ethical theory, Mill gives his own statement of the principle of utility (again employing a curiously religious word):  “The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals, Utility, or the Greatest Happiness Principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness.”  He immediately proceeds to interpret human happiness and unhappiness (as Bentham had done) in hedonistic terms of pleasure and pain ( Utilitarianism , pp. 33-34, 329, 257).  This presents the deceptive appearance of a remarkably simple rubric for practical judgment:  if an action generates an excess of pleasure over pain, that contributes to human happiness, which is our greatest good, making the action right; on the other hand, if an action generates an excess of pain over pleasure, that contributes to human unhappiness, which is our greatest evil, making the action wrong.  But what is deceptive about this is the notion that we can sufficiently anticipate future consequences to be able to predict where our actions will lead us.  (Notice, also, that unlike Kantian deontology, which makes what is right independent of good consequences, utilitarianism makes the former a function of the latter.)

Mill acknowledges that concern about a possible conflict between utility and justice has always been “one of the strongest obstacles” to the acceptance of utilitarianism.  If permanently enslaving a minority could produce overwhelming happiness for a majority (he was personally opposed to slavery as an unconscionable violation of human liberty), then, given that utility is the value that trumps all others, why shouldn’t the injustice of slavery be accepted as a (regrettably) necessary means to a socially desirable end, the former, however unfortunate, being thus justified?  Mill thinks that the key to solving this alleged problem is that of conceptual analysis, that if we properly understand what “utility” and “justice” are all about, we shall be able to see that no genuine conflict between them is possible.  We have already discerned what the former concept means and now need to elucidate the latter.  Mill lays out five dimensions of justice as we use the term:  (1) respecting others’ “ legal rights ” is considered just, while violating them is unjust; (2) respecting the “ moral right ” someone has to something is just, while violating it is unjust; (3) it is considered just to give a person what “he deserves ” and unjust to deny it; (4) it is thought unjust to “ break faith ” with another, while keeping faith with others is just; and (5) in some circumstances, it is deemed unjust “to be partial ” in one’s judgments and just to be impartial.  People commonly associate all of these with justice, and they do seem to represent legitimate aspects of the virtue.  (Interestingly, Mill rejects the idea “of equality ” as essential to our understanding of justice, a stand which would be problematic for Marxists.)  As he seeks his own common denominator for these various dimensions of justice, he observes that justice always goes beyond generic right and wrong to involve what “some individual person can claim from us as his moral right.”  This entails the legitimate sense that anyone who has committed an injustice deserves to be punished somehow (which connects with Kant).  Mill thinks all this boils down to the idea that justice is a term “for certain moral requirements, which, regarded collectively, stand higher in the scale of social utility,” being more obligatory “than any others.”  But this means that justice, properly understood, is a name for the most important of “social utilities” (ibid., pp. 296-301, 305, 309, 320-321).  Therefore there purportedly cannot be any genuine conflict between utility and justice.  If there ever were circumstances in which slavery were truly useful to humanity, then presumably it would be just; the reason it is (typically) unjust is that it violates utility.  The main goal here is to reduce justice to social utility, in such a way as to rule out, by definition, any ultimate conflict between the two.  Thus, the social role played by our sense of justice is allegedly that it serves the common good.

Mill’s other great work is On Liberty , which provides us with a connecting link between this utilitarian theory and applications of it to particular social issues.  The problem Mill sets for himself here is where to draw a reasonable line between areas in which society can rightly proscribe behavior and those in which people should be allowed the freedom to do as they will.  When is it just to interfere with a person’s acting on personal choice?  To solve this problem, which is as relevant today as it was a century and a half ago, he proposes his “one very simple principle” of liberty, which he states in two slightly different ways:  (1) the “self-protection” version holds that people can only legitimately interfere with the freedom of action of others to protect themselves from them; (2) the “harm” version maintains that force can only be justifiably used against other members of community to prevent their harming others.  It is not acceptable to use power against others to stop them from hurting only themselves.  Mill candidly admits that this principle is reasonably feasible only with regard to mature, responsible members of civilized societies—not to children or to the insane or even necessarily to primitive peoples who cannot make informed judgments about their own true good.  He decisively renounces any appeal to abstract rights as a basis for this principle, basing it simply on “utility in the largest sense, grounded on the permanent interests of a man as a progressive being.”  Notice that this presupposes that we can distinguish between other-regarding behavior, which may be justifiably regulated, and purely self-regarding behavior, which may not be.  If that turns out to be a false distinction, then Mill’s theory may collapse.  At any rate, he articulates at least three areas of social life in which people’s liberty should be “absolute and unqualified”:  (a) that of freedom of thought and expression; (b) that of freedom of personal lifestyle; and (c) the freedom to associate with others of one’s choice, so long as it is for peaceful purposes.  He seems confident that utility will always require that freedom be protected in these areas (ibid., pp. 135-138).  In other words, on this liberal utilitarian view, it would always be unjust for an individual or a social group, in a civilized society, deliberately to interfere with a responsible, rational person’s actions in any combination of these areas.

Let us now see how Mill applies his utilitarian theory to three problems of justice that are still timely today.  First of all, the issue of punishment is one he considers in Utilitarianism , though his discussion is aimed at considering alternative accounts rather than conclusively saying what he himself thinks (we might also observe that, in this short passage, he attacks the social contract theory as a useless fiction) (ibid., pp. 311-313).  As a utilitarian, he favors the judicious use of punishment in order to deter criminal activity.  He believes in the utility/justice of self-defense and sees the right to punish as anchored in that.  In 1868, as an elected member of Parliament, he made a famous speech in the House of Commons supporting capital punishment on utilitarian grounds.  Although it is clear that he would like to be able to support a bill for its abolition, the lawful order of society, a necessary condition of societal well-being, requires this means of deterring the most heinous crimes, such as aggravated murder.  He even thinks it a quicker, more humane punishment than incarcerating someone behind bars for the rest of his life.  Mill does worry about the possibility of executing an innocent person, but he thinks a carefully managed legal system can render this danger “extremely rare” (“Punishment,” pp. 266-272).  Thus his utilitarian theory provides him with a basis for supporting capital punishment as morally justifiable.  A second famous application of his utilitarian theory of justice Mill makes is to the issue of equal opportunity for women.  In the very first paragraph of The Subjection of Women , Mill maintains that “the principle which regulates the existing social relations between the two sexes—the legal subordination of one sex to the other—is wrong in itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement; and that it ought to be replaced by a principle of perfect equality, admitting no power or privilege on the one side, nor disability on the other.”  So he does not call for the preferential treatment of “affirmative action” but only for equal opportunity.  Unlike contemporary feminists, he does not appeal to women’s human rights as his rationale, but only to the maximization of “human happiness” and the liberty “that makes life valuable” ( Subjection , pp. 1, 26, 101).  Here, again, we have an issue of social justice to which his utilitarian theory is applied, generating liberal conclusions.  Our third issue of application is that of international non-intervention.  Mill’s general principle here is that using force against others is prima facie unjust. Although defensive wars can be justifiable, aggressive ones are not.  It can be justifiable to go to war without being attacked or directly threatened with an attack, for example, to help civilize a barbarian society, which, as such, allegedly has no rights.  It can be justifiable to save a subjected population from the oppression of a despotic government (“Non-Intervention,” pp. 376-383).  All of this is presumably a function of utilitarian welfare.  Once more, a still timely moral issue has been addressed using the utilitarian theory of justice.

These applications all plausibly utilize the values and reasoning of utilitarianism, which, by its very nature, must be consequentialist.  From that perspective, the deterrence approach to punishment, including capital punishment, seems appropriate, as do Mill’s call for equal opportunity for women and his measured position on international interventionism.  Surely, the premium he places on human happiness is admirable, as is his universal perspective, which views all humans as counting.  The problem is in his assumptions that all values are relative to consequences, that human happiness is the ultimate good, and that this reduces to the maximization of pleasure and the minimization of pain.  The upshot of this position is that, in principle, nothing can  be categorically forbidden, that, given sufficiently desirable ends, any means necessary to achieve them can be justified.  If we really believe that there can be no genuine conflict between justice and utility because the former is merely the most important part of the latter, then the rules of justice are reducible to calculations regarding what is generally conducive to the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people—mere inductive generalizations which must permit of exceptions; at least Mill’s ambiguity leaves him open to this interpretation.  There would seem to be a tension in Mill’s thought:  on the one hand, he wants to respect the liberty of all (civilized) responsible persons as rational agents; but, on the other hand, his commitment to utilitarianism would seem to subordinate that respect to the greatest good for the greatest number of people, allowing for the possibility of sacrificing the interests of the few to those of the many.

5. Contemporary Philosophers

From its founding, American political thought had an enduring focus on justice.  The Preamble to the American Constitution says that one of its primary goals is to “establish justice.”  Founding father James Madison, in 1788, wrote in The Federalist Papers that justice should be the goal of all government and of all civil society, that people are willing to risk even liberty in its pursuit.  American schoolchildren are made to memorize and recite a Pledge of Allegiance that ends with the words “with liberty and justice for all.”  So justice is an abiding American ideal.  We shall now consider how one of America’s greatest philosophers, John Rawls, addresses this ideal.  We should notice how he places a greater emphasis on equality than do most of his European predecessors—perhaps reflecting the conviction of the American Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal.”  (This greater emphasis may reflect the influence of Marx, whom he occasionally mentions.)  After considering the formidable contributions of Rawls to justice theory and some of its applications, we shall conclude this survey with a brief treatment of several post-Rawlsian alternatives.  A key focus that will distinguish this section from previous ones is the effort to achieve a conception of justice that strikes a reasonable balance between liberty and equality.

Rawls burst into prominence in 1958 with the publication of his game-changing paper, “Justice as Fairness.”  Though it was not his first important publication, it revived the social contract theory that had been languishing in the wake of Hume’s critique and its denigration by utilitarians and pragmatists, though it was a Kantian version of it that Rawls advocated.  This led to a greatly developed book version, A Theory of Justice , published in 1971, arguably the most important book of American philosophy published in the second half of the last century.  Rawls makes it clear that his theory, which he calls “justice as fairness,” assumes a Kantian view of persons as “free and equal,” morally autonomous, rational agents, who are not necessarily egoists.  He also makes it clear early on that he means to present his theory as a preferable alternative to that of utilitarians.  He asks us to imagine persons in a hypothetical “initial situation” which he calls “the original position” (corresponding to the “state of nature” or “natural condition” of Hobbes, but clearly not presented as any sort of historical or pre-historical fact).  This is strikingly characterized by what Rawls calls “the veil of ignorance,” a device designed to minimize the influence of selfish bias in attempting to determine what would be just.  If you must decide on what sort of society you could commit yourself to accepting as a permanent member and were not allowed to factor in specific knowledge about yourself—such as your gender, race, ethnic identity, level of intelligence, physical strength, quickness and stamina, and so forth—then you would presumably exercise the rational choice to make the society as fair for everyone as possible, lest you find yourself at the bottom of that society for the rest of your life.  In such a “purely hypothetical” situation, Rawls believes that we would rationally adopt two basic principles of justice for our society:  “the first requires equality in the assignment of basic rights and duties, while the second holds that social and economic inequalities, for example inequalities of wealth and authority, are just only if they result in compensating benefits for everyone, and in particular for the least advantaged members of society.”  Here we see Rawls conceiving of justice, the primary social virtue, as requiring equal basic liberties for all citizens and a presumption of equality even regarding socio-economic goods.  He emphasizes the point that these principles rule out as unjust the utilitarian justification of disadvantages for some on account of greater advantages for others, since that would be rationally unacceptable to one operating under the veil of ignorance.  Like Kant, Rawls is opposed to the teleological or consequentialist gambit of defining the right (including the just) in terms of “maximizing the good”; he rather, like Kant, the deontologist, is committed to a “priority of the right over the good.”  Justice is not reducible to utility or pragmatic desirability.  We should notice that the first principle of justice, which requires maximum equality of rights and duties for all members of society, is prior in “serial or lexical order” to the second, which specifies how socio-economic inequalities can be justified ( Theory , pp. 12-26, 31, 42-43).  Again, this is anti-utilitarian, in that no increase in socio-economic benefits for anyone can ever justify anything less than maximum equality of rights and duties for all.  Thus, for example, if enslaving a few members of society generated vastly more benefits for the majority than liabilities for them, such a bargain would be categorically ruled out as unjust.

Rawls proceeds to develop his articulation of these two principles of justice more carefully.  He reformulates the first one in terms of maximum equal liberty, writing that “each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with a similar liberty for others.”  The basic liberties intended concern such civil rights as are protected in our Constitution—free speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of conscience, the right to private property, the rights to vote and hold public office, freedom from arbitrary arrest and seizure, etc.  The lexical priority of this first principle requires that it be categorical in that the only justification for limiting any basic liberties would be to enhance other basic liberties; for example, it might be just to limit free access of the press to a sensational legal proceeding in order to protect the right of the accused to a fair trial.  Rawls restates his second principle to maintain that “social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both (a) reasonably expected to be to everyone’s advantage, and (b) attached to positions and offices open to all.”  Thus socio-economic inequalities can be justified, but only if both conditions are met.  The first condition (a) is “the difference principle” and takes seriously the idea that every socio-economic difference separating one member of society from others must be beneficial to all, including the person ranked lowest.  The second condition is one of “fair equality of opportunity,” in that socio-economic advantages must be connected to positions to which all members of society could have access.  For example, the office of the presidency has attached to it greater social prestige and income than is available to most of us.  Is that just?  It can be, assuming that all of us, as citizens, could achieve that office with its compensations and that even those of us at or near the bottom of the socio-economic scale benefit from intelligent, talented people accepting the awesome responsibilities of that office.  Just as the first principle must be lexically prior to the second, Rawls also maintains that “fair opportunity is prior to the difference principle.”  Thus, if we have to choose between equal opportunity for all and socio-economically benefiting “the least advantaged” members of society, the former has priority over the latter.  Most of us today might be readily sympathetic to the first principle and the equal opportunity condition, while finding the difference principle to be objectionably egalitarian, to the point of threatening incentives to contribute more than is required.  Rawls does consider a “mixed conception” of justice that most of us would regard as more attractive “arising when the principle of average utility constrained by a certain social minimum is substituted for the difference principle, everything else remaining unchanged.”  But there would be a problem of fairly agreeing on that acceptable social minimum, and it would change with shifting contingent circumstances.  It is curious that his own theory of “justice as fairness” gets attacked by socialists such as Nielsen (whom we shall consider) for sacrificing equality for the sake of liberty and by libertarians such as Nozick (whom we shall also consider) for giving up too much liberty for the sake of equality.  Rawls briefly suggests that his theory of justice as fairness might be applied to international relations, in general, and to just war theory, in particular (ibid., pp. 60-65, 75, 83, 302-303, 316, 378).

Rawls applies his theory of justice to the domestic issue of civil disobedience.  No society is perfectly just.  A generally or “nearly just society” can have unjust laws, in which case its citizens may or may not have a duty to comply with them, depending on how severely unjust they are.  If the severity of the injustice is not great, then respect for democratic majority rule might morally dictate compliance.  Otherwise, citizens can feel a moral obligation to engage in civil disobedience, which Rawls defines as “a public, nonviolent, conscientious yet political act contrary to law usually done with the aim of bringing about a change in the law or policies of the government.”  Certain conditions must be met in order that an act of civil disobedience be justified:  (1) it should normally address violations of equal civil liberties (the first principle of justice) and/or of “fair equality of opportunity” (the second part of the second principle), with violations of the difference principle (the first part of the second principle) being murkier and, thus, harder to justify; (2) the act of civil disobedience should come only after appeals to the political majority have been reasonably tried and failed; (3) it must seem likely to accomplish more good than harm for the social order.  Yet, even if all three of these conditions seem to be met and the disobedient action seems right, there remains the practical question of whether it would be “wise or prudent,” under the circumstances, to engage in the act of civil disobedience.  Ultimately, every individual must decide for himself or herself whether such action is morally and prudentially justifiable or not as reasonably and responsibly as possible.  The acts of civil disobedience of Martin Luther King (to whom Rawls refers in a footnote) seem to have met all the conditions, to have been done in the name of justice, and to have been morally justified (ibid., pp. 350-357, 363-367, 372-376, 389-390, 364n).

Rawls’s second book was Political Liberalism .  Here he works out how a just political conception might develop a workable “overlapping consensus” despite the challenges to social union posed by a pluralism of “reasonable comprehensive doctrines.”  This, of course, calls for some explanation.  A just society must protect basic liberties equally for all of its members, including freedom of thought and its necessary condition, freedom of expression.  But, in a free society that protects these basic liberties, a pluralism of views and values is likely to develop, such that people can seriously disagree about matters they hold dear.  They will develop their own “comprehensive doctrines,” or systems of beliefs that may govern all significant aspects of their lives.  These may be religious (like Christianity) or philosophical (like Kantianism) or moral (like utilitarian).  Yet a variety of potentially conflicting comprehensive doctrines may be such that all are reasonable.  In such a case, social unity requires respect for and tolerance of other sets of beliefs.  It would be unjust deliberately to suppress reasonable comprehensive doctrines merely because they are different from our own.  The problem of political liberalism nowadays is how we can establish “a stable and just society whose free and equal citizens are deeply divided by conflicting and even incommensurable religious, philosophical, and moral doctrines.”  What is needed is a shared “political conception of justice” that is neutral regarding competing comprehensive doctrines.  This could allow for “an overlapping consensus of reasonable comprehensive doctrines,” such that tolerance and mutual respect are operative even among those committed to incompatible views and values, so long as they are reasonable ( Liberalism , pp. 291-292, 340-342, 145, xviii, 13, 152n., 59-60, 133, 154-155, 144, 134).  Thus, for example, a Christian Kantian and an atheistic utilitarian, while sincerely disagreeing on many ethical principles, philosophical ideas, and religious beliefs, can unite in mutually accepting, for instance, the American Constitution as properly binding on all of us equally.  This agreement will enable them mutually to participate in social cooperation, the terms of which are fair and reciprocal and which can contribute to the reasonable good of the entire society.

Near the end of his life, Rawls published The Law of Peoples , in which he tried to apply his theory of justice to international relations.  Given that not all societies act justly and that societies have a right to defend themselves against aggressive violent force, there can be a right to go to war ( jus ad bellum ).  Yet even then, not all is fair in war, and rules of just warfare ( jus in bello ) should be observed:  (1) the goal must be a “just and lasting peace”; (2) it must be waged in defense of freedom and security from aggression; (3) reasonable attempts must be made not to attack innocent non-combatants; (4) the human rights of enemies (for example, against being tortured) must be respected; (5) attempts should be made to establish peaceful relations; and (6) practical tactics must always remain within the parameters of moral principles.  After hostilities have ceased, just conquerors must treat their conquered former enemies with respect—not, for example, enslaving them or denying them civil liberties.  Rawls adds a very controversial “supreme emergency exemption” in relation to the third rule—when a relatively just society’s very survival is in desperate peril, its attacking enemy civilian populations, as by bombing cities, can be justifiable.  More generally, Rawls applies his theory of justice to international relations, generating eight rules regarding how the people of other societies must be treated.  While we do not have time to explore them all here, the last one is sufficiently provocative to be worth our considering:  “Peoples have a duty to assist other peoples living under unfavorable conditions that prevent their having a just or decent political and social regime.”  This, of course, goes beyond not exploiting, cheating, manipulating, deceiving, and interfering with others to a positive duty of trying to help them, at the cost of time, money, and other resources.  Justice demands that we try to assist what Rawls calls “burdened societies,” so that doing so is not morally supererogatory.  What is most interesting here is what Rawls refuses to say.  While different peoples, internationally speaking, might be imagined in an original position under the veil of ignorance, and Rawls would favor encouraging equal liberties and opportunities for all, he refuses to apply the difference principle globally in such a way as to indicate that justice requires a massive redistribution of wealth from richer to poorer societies ( Peoples , pp. 94-96, 98-99, 37, 106, 114-117).

From a critical perspective, Rawls’s theory of civil disobedience is excellent, as are his theory of political liberalism and his version of the just war theory, except for that “supreme emergency exemption,” which uncharacteristically tries to make right a function of teleological good.  His views on international aid seem so well worked out that, ironically, they call into question part of his general theory of justice itself.  It does not seem plausible that the difference principle should apply intrasocietally but not internationally.  The problem may be with the difference principle itself.  It is not at all clear that rational agents in a hypothetical original position would adopt such an egalitarian principle.  The veil of ignorance leading to this controversial principle can itself be questioned as artificial and unrealistic; one might object that, far from being methodologically neutral, it sets up a bias (towards, for example, being risk-aversive) that renders Rawls’s own favored principles of justice almost a foregone conclusion.  Indeed, the “mixed conception” that Rawls himself considers and rejects seems more plausible and more universally applicable—keeping the first principle and the second part of the second but replacing the difference principle with one of average utility, constrained by some social minimum, adjustable with changing circumstances.  Thus we could satisfactorily specify the requirements of an essentially Kantian conception of justice, as requiring respect for the dignity of all persons as free and equal, rational moral agents.  While less egalitarian than what Rawls offers, it might prove an attractive alternative.  To what extent should liberty be constrained by equality in a just society?  This is a central issue that divides him from many post-Rawlsians, to a few of whom we now briefly turn.

b. Post-Rawls

Rawls’s monumental work on justice theory revitalized political philosophy in the United States and other English-speaking countries.  In this final subsection, we shall briefly survey some of the most important recent attempts to provide preferable alternatives to Rawls’s conception of justice.  They will represent six different approaches.  We shall consider, in succession, (1) the libertarian approach of Robert Nozick, (2) the socialistic one of Kai Nielsen, (3) the communitarian one of Michael Sandel, (4) the globalist one of Thomas Pogge, (5) the feminist one of Martha Nussbaum, and (6) the rights-based one of Michael Boylan.  As this is merely a quick survey, we shall not delve much into the details of their theories (limiting ourselves to a single work by each) or explore their applications or do much in the way of a critique of them.  But the point will be to get a sense of several recent approaches to developing views of justice in the wake of Rawls.

(1)    Nozick

Nozick (a departmental colleague of Rawls at Harvard) was one of the first and remains one of the most famous critics of Rawls’s liberal theory of justice.  Both are fundamentally committed to individual liberty.  But as a libertarian, Nozick is opposed to compromising individual liberty in order to promote socio-economic equality and advocates a “minimal state” as the only sort that can be socially just.  In Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), especially in its famous chapter on “Distributive Justice,” while praising Rawls’s first book as the most important “work in political and moral philosophy” since that of Mill, Nozick  argues for what he calls an “entitlement conception of justice” in terms of three principles of just holdings.  First, anyone who justly acquires any holding is rightly entitled to keep and use it.  Second, anyone who acquires any holding by means of a just transfer of property is rightly entitled to keep and use it.  It is only through some combination of these two approaches that anyone is rightly entitled to any holding.  But some people acquire holdings unjustly—e.g., by theft or fraud or force—so that there are illegitimate holdings.  So, third, justice can require the rectification of unjust past acquisitions.  These three principles of just holdings—“the principle of acquisition of holdings, the principle of transfer of holdings, and the principle of rectification of the violations of the first two principles”—constitute the core of Nozick’s libertarian entitlement theory of justice.  People should be entitled to use their own property as they see fit, so long as they are entitled to it.  On this view, any pattern of distribution, such as Rawls’s difference principle, that would force people to give up any holdings to which they are entitled in order to give it to someone else (i.e., a redistribution of wealth) is unjust.  Thus, for Nozick, any state, such as ours or one Rawls would favor, that is “more extensive” than a minimal state and redistributes wealth by taxing those who are relatively well off to benefit the disadvantaged necessarily “violates people’s rights” ( State , pp. 149, 183, 230, 150-153, 230-231, 149).

(2)    Nielsen

Nielsen, as a socialist (against both Rawls and Nozick) considers equality to be a more fundamental ideal than individual liberty; this is more in keeping with Marxism than with the liberal/libertarian tradition that has largely stemmed from Locke.  (Whereas capitalism supports the ownership and control of the means of producing and distribution material goods by private capital or wealth, socialism holds that they should be owned and controlled by society as a whole.)  If Nozick accuses Rawls of going too far in requiring a redistribution of wealth, Nielsen criticizes him for favoring individual liberty at the expense of social equality.  In direct contrast to Rawls’s two liberal principles of justice, in “Radical Egalitarian Justice:  Justice as Equality,” Nielsen proposes his own two socialistic principles constituting the core of his “egalitarian conception of justice.”  In his first principle, he calls for “equal basic liberties and opportunities” (rather than for merely “equal basic liberties”), including the opportunities “for meaningful work, for self-determination, and political participation,” which he considers important to promote “equal moral autonomy and equal self-respect.”  Also (unlike Rawls) he does not claim any lexical priority for either principle over the other.  His sharper departure from Rawls can be found in his second principle, which is to replace the difference principle that allegedly justified socio-economic in equality.  After specifying a few qualifications, it calls for “the income and wealth” of society “to be so divided that each person will have a right to an equal share” and for the burdens of society “also to be equally shared, subject, of course, to limitations by differing abilities and differing situations.”  He argues that his own second principle would better promote “equal self-respect and equal moral autonomy” among the members of society.  Thus we might eliminate social stratification and class exploitation, in accordance with the ideals of Marxist humanism (“Equality,” pp. 209, 211-213, 222-225).

(3)    Sandel

Sandel, as a communitarian, argues (against Rawls and Nozick) that the well-being of a community takes precedence over individual liberty and (against Nielsen) over the socio-economic welfare of its members.  While acknowledging that Rawls is not so “narrowly individualistic” as to rule out the value of building social community, in Liberalism and the Limits of Justice , he maintains that the individualism of persons in the original position is such that “a sense of community” is not a basic “constituent of their identify as such,” so that community is bound to remain secondary and derivative in the Rawlsian theory.  To deny that community values help constitute one’s personal identity is to render impossible any preexisting interpersonal good from which a sense of right can be derived.  Thus, for Sandel, Rawls’s myopic theory of human nature gives him no basis for any pre-political natural rights.  So his conception of justice based on this impoverished view must fail to reflect “the shared self-understandings” of who they are as members of community that must undergird the basic structure of political society.  Through the interpersonal relationships of community, we establish “more or less enduring attachments and commitments” that help define who we are, as well as the values that will help characterize our sense of justice as a common good that cannot be properly understood by individuals detached from community.  Thus justice must determine what is right as serving the goods we embrace in a social context—“as members of this family or community or nation or people, as bearers of this history, as sons and daughters of that revolution, as citizens of this republic” rather than as abstract individuals ( Limits , pp. 66, 60-65, 87, 150, 172-174, 179, 183, 179).

(4)    Pogge

Pogge develops a globalist interpretation of justice as fairness that, in a sense, is more consistent than Rawls’s own.  More specifically, it not only accepts the difference principle but wants to apply it on an international level as well as nationally.  In “An Egalitarian Law of Peoples,” Pogge observes that Rawls means his theory of justice to be relatively “egalitarian.”  And, as applied intranationally, so it is.  But, as applied internationally, it is not.  As he says, there is a disconnect “between Rawls’s conception of domestic and of global justice.”  (We should note that, like Sandel’s critique, which we just considered, Pogge’s is not a complete theory of justice, but more a modification of Rawls’s own.)  While Rawls does believe that well-off societies have a duty to assist burdened societies, he rejects the idea of a global application of his difference principle.  What Pogge is proposing is a global egalitarian principle of distributive justice.  He thinks that this will address socio-economic equalities that are to the detriment of the world’s worst-off persons.  What he proposes is “a global resources tax, or GRT.”  This means that, although each of the peoples of our planet “owns and fully controls all resources within its national territory,” it will be taxed on all of the resources it extracts.  If it uses those extracted resources itself, it must pay the tax itself.  If it sells some to other societies, presumably at least part of the tax burden will be borne by buyers in the form of higher sales prices.  “The GRT is then a tax on consumption” of our planet’s resources.  Corporations extracting resources (such as oil companies and coal mining companies) would pay their taxes to their governments which, in turn, would be responsible for transferring funds to disadvantaged societies to help the global poor.  Such payments should be regarded as “a matter of entitlement rather than charity,” an obligation of international justice.  If the governments of the poorer states were honest, they could disburse the funds; if they were corrupt, then transfers could go through United Nations agencies and/or nongovernmental organizations.  At any rate, they should be channeled toward societies in which they could improve the lot of the poor and disadvantaged.  (Of course, less well-off societies would be free to refuse such funds, if they so chose.)  But, one might wonder, would well-off societies only be motivated to pay their fair share by benevolence, a sense of justice, and possible shame at being exposed for not doing so?  No, there could be international sanctions:  “Once the agency facilitating the flow of GRT payments reports that a country has not met its obligations under the scheme, all other countries are required to impose duties on imports from, and perhaps also similar levies on exports to, this country to raise funds equivalent to its GRT obligations plus the cost of these enforcement measures.”  Pogge believes that well-off societies should recognize that his more egalitarian model of international relations is also more just than Rawls’s law of peoples (“Egalitarian,” pp. 195-196, 210, 199-202, 205, 219, 224).

(5)    Nussbaum

Nussbaum, like Pogge (and unlike Nozick and Nielsen), does not so much reject Rawls’s liberal conception of justice as extend its explicit application.  In Sex and Social Justice , she argues for a feminist interpretation of justice, using what she calls a “capabilities approach” that connects with “the tradition of Kantian liberalism,” nowadays represented by Rawls, tapping into their “notions of dignity and liberty,” as a foundation for discussing the demands of justice regarding “women’s equality and women’s human rights.”  The feminism she embraces has five key dimensions:  (1) an internationalism, such that it is not limited to any one particular culture; (2) a humanism, such as affirms a basic equal worth in all human beings and promotes justice for all; (3) a commitment to liberalism as the perspective that best protects and promotes the “basic human capacities for choice and reasoning” that render all humans as having an equal worth; (4) a sensitivity to the cultural shaping of our preferences and desires; and (5) a concern for sympathetic understanding between the sexes.  She expresses an appreciation for the primary goods at the core of Rawls’s theory, while asserting that his analysis does not go far enough.  She offers her own list of ten “central human functional capabilities” that must be respected by a just society:  (1) life of a normal, natural duration; (2) bodily health and integrity, including adequate nourishment and shelter; (3) bodily integrity regarding, for example, freedom of movement and security against assault; (4) freedom to exercise one’s senses, imagination, and thought as one pleases, which includes freedom of expression; (5) freedom to form emotional attachments to persons and things, which includes freedom of association; (6) the development and exercise of practical reason, the capacity to form one’s own conception of the good and to try to plan one’s own life, which includes the protection of freedom of conscience; (7) freedom of affiliation on equal terms with others, which involves provisions of nondiscrimination; (8) concern for and possible relationships with animals, plants, and the world of nature; (9) the freedom to play, to seek amusement, and to enjoy recreational activities; and (10) some control over one’s own political environment, including the right to vote, and one’s material environment, including the rights to seek meaningful work and to hold property.  All of these capabilities are essential to our functioning as flourishing human beings and should be assured for all citizens of a just society.  But, historically, women have been and still are short-changed with respect to them and should be guaranteed their protection in the name of justice ( Sex , pp. 24, 6-14, 34, 40-42).

(6)    Boylan

Boylan has recently presented “a ‘rights-based’ deontological approach based upon the necessary conditions for human action.”  In A Just Society , he observes that human goods are more or less deeply “embedded” as conditions of human action, leading to a hierarchy that can be set forth.  There are two levels of basic goods.  The most deeply embedded of these, such as food, clothing, shelter, protection from physical harm, are absolutely necessary for any meaningful human action.  The second level of basic goods comprises (less) deeply embedded ones, such as basic knowledge and skills such as are imparted by education, social structures that allow us to trust one another, basic assurance that we will not be exploited, and the protection of basic human rights.  Next, there are three levels of secondary goods.  The most embedded of these are life enhancing, if not necessary for any meaningful action, such as respect, equal opportunity, and the capacity to form and follow one’s own plan of life and to participate actively and equally in community, characterized by shared values.  A second level of secondary goods comprises those that are useful for human action, such as having and being able to use property, being able to benefit from one’s own labor, and being able to pursue goods typically owned by most of one’s fellow citizens.  The third level of secondary goods comprises those that are least embedded as conditions of meaningful action but still desirable as luxuries, such as being able to seek pleasant objectives that most of one’s fellow citizens cannot expect to achieve and being able to compete for somewhat more than others in one’s society.  The more deeply embedded goods are as conditions of meaningful human action, the more right to them people have.  Boylan follows Kant and Rawls in holding an ultimate moral imperative is that individual human agents and their rights must be respected.  This is a matter of justice, distributive justice involving a fair distribution of social goods and services and retributive justice involving proper ways for society to treat those who violate the rules.  A just society has a duty to provide basic goods equally to all of its members, if it can do so.  But things get more complicated with regards to secondary goods.  A just society will try to provide the first level of secondary goods, those that are life enhancing, equally to all its members.  Yet this becomes more problematic with the second and third levels of secondary goods—those that are useful and luxurious—as the conditions for meaningful human action have already been satisfied by more deeply embedded ones.  The need that people have to derive rewards for their work commensurate with their achievement would seem to militate against any guarantee of equal shares in these, even if society could provide them, although comparable achievement should be comparably rewarded.  Finally, in the area of retributive justice, we may briefly consider three scenarios.  First, when one person takes a tangible good from another person, justice requires that the perpetrator return to the victim some tangible good(s) of comparable worth, plus compensation proportionate to the harm done the victim by the loss.  Second, when one person takes an intangible good from another person, justice requires that the perpetrator give the victim some tangible good as adequate compensation for the pain and suffering caused by the loss.  And, third, when one person injures another person through the deprivation of a valued good that negatively affects society, society can justly incarcerate the perpetrator for a period of time proportionate to the loss ( Society , pp. x, 53-54, 56-58, 131, 138, 143-144, 164-167, 174-175, 181, 183).

In conclusion, we might observe that, in this rights-based alternative, as in the previous five (the libertarian, the socialistic, the communitarian, the globalist, and the feminist) we have considered, there is an attempt to interpret justice as requiring respect for the dignity of all persons as free and equal, rational moral agents.  This historical survey has tracked the progressive development of this Kantian idea as becoming increasingly prominent in Western theories of justice.

6. References and Further Readings

A. primary sources.

• Thomas Aquinas,  On Law, Morality, and Politics , ed. William P. Baumgarth and Richard J. Regan, S.J. (called “ Law ”).  Indianapolis:  Hackett, 1988.
• Thomas Aquinas,  Summa Theologica , trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, Vol. One (called “ Summa ”).  New York:  Benziger Brothers, 1947.
• Aristotle,  Nicomachean Ethics , trans. Terence Irwin, Second Edition (called “ Nicomachean ”).  Indianapolis:  Hackett, 1999.
• Aristotle,  On Rhetoric , trans. George A. Kennedy (called “ Rhetoric ”).  New York:  Oxford University Press, 1991.
• Aristotle,  Politics , trans. C. D. C. Reeve (called “ Politics ”).  Indianapolis:  Hackett, 1998.
• Augustine,  The City of God , trans. Henry Bettenson (called “ City ”).  London:  Penguin Books, 1984.
• Augustine,  Of True Religion , trans. J. H. S. Burleigh (called “ Religion ”).  Chicago:  Henry Regnery, 1959.
• Augustine,  On Free Choice of the Will , trans. Thomas Williams (called “ Choice ”).  Indianapolis:  Hackett, 1993.
• Augustine,  Political Writings , trans. and ed. Michael W. Tkacz and Douglas Kries (called “ Political ”).  Indianapolis:  Hackett, 1994).
• Michael Boylan,  A Just Society  (called “ Society ”).  Lanham, MD:  Rowman & Littlefield, 2004.
• Thomas Hobbes,  The Elements of Law , ed. J. C. A. Gaskin (called “ Elements ”).  Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1994.
• Thomas Hobbes,  Leviathan , ed. Edwin Curley.  Indianapolis:  Hackett, 1994.
• Thomas Hobbes,  Man and Citizen , ed. Bernard Gert (called “ Citizen ”).  Indianapolis:  Hackett, 1991.
• Thomas Hobbes,  Writings on Common Law and Hereditary Right , ed. Alan Cromartie and Quentin Skinner (called “ Common ”).  Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2008.
• David Hume,  An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals , ed. J. B. Schneewind (called “ Enquiry ”).  Indianapolis:  Hackett, 1983.
• David Hume,  Political Essays , ed. Knud Haakonssen (called “ Essays ”).  Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1994.
• David Hume,  A Treatise of Human Nature , ed. David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton (called “ Treatise ”).  Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2000.
• Immanuel Kant,  Ethical Philosophy , trans. James W. Ellington, Second Edition (called “ Ethical ”).  Indianapolis:  Hackett, 1994.
• Immanuel Kant,  Lectures on Ethics , trans. Louis Infield (called “ Lectures ”).  New York:  Harper & Row, 1963).
• Immanuel Kant,  Metaphysical Elements of Justice , trans. John Ladd, Second Edition (called “ Justice ”).  Indianapolis:  Hackett, 1999.
• Immanuel Kant,  Political Writings , trans. H. B. Nisbet, ed. Hans Reiss, Second Edition (called “ Writings ”).  Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1991.
• John Locke,  Second Treatise of Government , ed. C. B. Macpherson.  Indianapolis:  Hackett, 1980.
• Karl Marx,  Selected Writings , ed. Lawrence H. Simon.  Indianapolis:  Hackett, 1994.
• John Stuart Mill, “A Few Words on Non-Intervention,” in  Essays on Politics and Culture , ed. Gertrude Himmelfarb (called “Non-Intervention”).  Garden City, NY:  Anchor Books, 1963.
• John Stuart Mill, “Capital Punishment,” in  Public and Parliamentary Speeches , ed. John M. Robson and Bruce L. Kinzer (called “Punishment”).  Toronto:  University of Toronto Press, 1988.
• John Stuart Mill,  The Subjection of Women  (called “ Subjection” ).  Mineola, NY:  Dover, 1997.
• This anthology also contains some Bentham and some Austin.
• Kai Nielsen, “Radical Egalitarian Justice:  Justice as Equality” (called “Equality”).   Social Theory and Practice , Vol. 5, No. 2, 1979.
• Robert Nozick,  Anarchy, State, and Utopia  (called “ State ”).  New York:  Basic Books, 1974.
• Martha C. Nussbaum,  Sex and Social Justice  (called “ Sex ”).  New York:  Oxford University Press, 1999.
• Plato,  Five Dialogues , trans. G. M. A. Grube (called “ Dialogues ”).  Indianapolis:  Hackett, 1981.
• Plato,  Gorgias , trans. Donald J. Zeyl.  Indianapolis:  Hackett, 1987.
• Plato,  The Laws , trans. Trevor J. Saunders (called “ Laws ”).  London:  Penguin Books, 1975.
• Plato,  Republic , trans. G. M. A. Grube, revised by C. D. C. Reeve.  Indianapolis:  Hackett, 1992.
• Thomas W. Pogge, “An Egalitarian Law of Peoples” (called “Egalitarian”).   Philosophy and Public Affairs , Vol. 23, No. 3, 1994.
• John Rawls,  Collected Papers , ed. Samuel Freeman (called “ Papers ”).  Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1999.
• John Rawls,  The Law of Peoples  (called “ Peoples ”).  Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1999.
• John Rawls,  Political Liberalism  (called “ Liberalism ”).  New York:  Columbia University Press, 1996.
• John Rawls,  A Theory of Justice  (called “ Theory ”).  Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1971.
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau,  On the Social Contract , trans. G. D. H. Cole.  Mineola, NY:  Dover, 2003.
• Michael J. Sandel,  Liberalism and the Limits of Justice  (called “ Limits ”).  New York:  Cambridge University Press, 1982.
• Robin Waterfield, trans.,  The First Philosophers  (called “ First ”).  New York:  Oxford University Press, 2000.

b. Secondary Sources

• This is a good collection of contemporary readings, especially one by Kai Nielsen.
• The articles on Aristotle’s “Ethics” and “Politics” are particularly relevant.
• This is a good study.
• Brian Barry,  Theories of Justice .  Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1989.  This discussion makes up in depth what it lacks in breadth.
• This is an old but still valuable anthology.
• This is an early but still worthwhile collection of papers, with “Justice and International Relations,” by Charles R. Beitz, being particularly provocative.
• See, especially, the chapter on “Justice and Rights,” which contains a critique of Rawls’s theory.
• The fourth chapter, on “Justice and Personal Desert,” is especially relevant.
• Like all the books in this series, this one offers a fine array of critical articles, with the one by Martha C. Nussbaum being particularly noteworthy.
• 14 essays by scholars from 8 countries.  There is a reply by Boylan.
• See, in particular, the articles by John M. Cooper and Kraut himself.
• In particular, see “Do Rawls’s Two Theories of Justice Fit Together,” by Thomas Pogge.
• This is a good contemporary treatment.
• See, especially, “The Structure of Hume’s Political Theory,” by Knud Haakonssen.
• This is a constructive critique of Rawls’s early work.
• The fifth chapter focuses on justice.
• This contains discussions of Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Hobbes, Hume, Kant, Mill, and (a bit on) Rawls.
• An interesting collection, with a particularly penetrating article by Kai Nielsen.
• This is a very good overview article.
• This is interesting as a contemporary treatment from the continental tradition.
• This is a valuable, in-depth analysis.
• This is a very good anthology of classical and contemporary readings.
• This is an interesting anthology of readings that includes Sandel’s own article on “Political Liberalism.”
• This is an in-depth examination of Socratic, Platonic, and Aristotelian views.
• This is a wide-ranging recent study.
• See, especially, “Mill’s Utilitarianism,” by Wendy Donner.
• This is a nice and well-organized collection of classical and contemporary texts.
• This is a good monograph.
• This is a well-organized collection that includes a classic feminist critique of Rawls, taken from  Justice, Gender and the Family , by Susan Okin.
• See, especially, “Justice and Happiness in the  Republic ,” by Vlastos himself.
• This is an in-depth contemporary exploration of the topic.
• This is a comprehensive study.
• This is a good recent comparative analysis.
• This is one of the best anthologies of classic texts on this subject.

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Wayne P. Pomerleau Email: [email protected] Gonzaga University U. S. A.

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Disability and Justice

Among the topics in philosophy and disability, the relationship between disability and justice has received the lion’s share of attention. No doubt this is in part because justice, often regarded as the “first virtue of social institutions” (Rawls 1971: 3), is central to the evaluation of social policies and public institutions. But it is also because disability has played at least two distinct roles in recent discussions of social justice. First, disability has been seen by many as a paradigm example of unchosen disadvantage. Hence, disability has played a central role in internal discussions of luck egalitarianism, in particular with respect to the “currency” question—equality of what?—and external discussions, in particular with respect to the question of whether luck egalitarianism is disrespectful or stigmatizing. Second, people with disabilities, particularly intellectual or cognitive disabilities, have been seen by many as a “limit case” for contractarian or contractualist theories of justice. Hence, disability has played a central role in discussions about the eligibility conditions for being party to the contractual procedures by which principles of justice are chosen and for being subject to the principles of justice so chosen.

Disability also presents difficult issues as a social or group identity: roughly, a central part of the way an individual understands, presents, or values herself. This aspect of disability has been made salient by the civil rights movement that established disability as an important category in antidiscrimination law. Theories that assess justice in terms of the distribution of resources or opportunities have sometimes been criticized for failing to take adequate account of such identities. But the embrace of social identity as a component of justice can be equally problematic.

Disability is of special interest for justice because of the way in which it juxtaposes two basic and powerful senses of injustice . These two senses of injustice are sometimes expressed in terms of a distinction between the justice of distributions and the justice of recognition, or more recently, between distributive justice and relational injustice. Very roughly, we can think of these labels as denoting a distinction between the injustice of certain outcomes —in particular, outcomes in which there is an inequality of income, wealth, health, or other aspects of well-being resulting from morally irrelevant factors—and the injustice of certain forms of treatment —in particular, the treatment of some people as moral, social, or political inferiors on the basis of morally irrelevant characteristics. Correcting the first form of injustice is thought to require, fundamentally, a change in the distribution of resources, broadly construed, that affect well-being. Correcting the first form of injustice is thought to require, fundamentally, a change in the structure and character of interpersonal relationships, which may in turn require changes to social and institutional norms and practices. Needless to say, the relationship and comparative importance of these two forms of injustice have been the subject of considerable discussion, and there is no canonical statement of the distinction (Fourie et al. 2015; Anderson 1999; Fraser 2001, 1996; Honneth 1992).

This entry is organized as follows: Section 1 will discuss disability in terms of these two broad types of injustice. Sections 2 and 3 will examine the implications of different models of disability for the distinction between redistribution and recognition. Section 4 will then examine the treatment of disability in contemporary theories of distributive justice. It will explain how the environmental and social character of disability has been largely overlooked by contractarian and egalitarian theories, not so much because of their distributive focus, but because of their narrow focus on one aspect of disability—functional limitation—to the neglect of exclusionary attitudes and practices. Section 4 will conclude by discussing recent efforts to rectify this neglect, describing several ways in which distributive justice theorists have sought to take account of environmental and social barriers and to address claims for recognition. These efforts include broadening the metric for just distributions to encompass respectful relationships and social practices; arguing that a just distribution on such broader metrics can be attained more effectively and appropriately by modifying the physical and social environment than by redistributing resources among individuals; and adopting outcome standards that do not require strict equality on any metric but rather the reduction or elimination of disrespectful inequalities. Section 5 will discuss a major issue in the recognition of disability: the relationship of disability identity to various approaches to justice, where “identity” is understood as a part of an individual’s self-understanding or self-presentation.

1. Disability, Recognition, and Redistribution

2. models of disability and their implications for justice, 3. justice, reconstruction, and reasonable accommodation, 4.1 disability and contemporary social contract theories, 4.2 disability, outcome-oriented theories, and the “currency” of justice, 4.3 the appropriate metric for distributive justice, 4.4 the appropriate standard for distributive justice, 5. justice, disability identities, and epistemic injustice, 6. conclusion, other internet resources, related entries.

It is clear that people with disabilities have long been treated as moral and social inferiors, at the same time that they have suffered distributive injustices of various kinds (see generally, Barclay 2018). Routinely, people with disabilities have been denied jobs for which they are highly qualified because they have been considered incompetent, or because employers have not been comfortable with their presence in the workplace. Often, people with certain disabilities have been consigned to segregated institutions and facilities because they have been regarded as incapable of making decisions or caring for themselves, or because others in the community did not want to interact with them.

These forms of relational injustice are associated with very concrete material inequalities. In 2009, almost 20 years after the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, the employment-population ratio of people with disabilities in the United States was 19.2%, compared to 64.5% for persons without a disability (Bureau of Labor Statistics 2010). Based on data from 1996–1999, researchers estimate that 47.4% of working-age adults who experienced poverty for a year or more had at least one disability (Fremstad 2009).

Facts such as these have led some to conclude that

in particular, internally diverse ways, people with disabilities have been on the end of a kind of pincer movement between Fraser’s two impediments to parity: “misrecognition” and “maldistribution” (Calder 2010: 62).

In these respects, people with disabilities are in a comparable position to members of other “discrete and insular minorities” with a history of being subject to both distributive and relational injustice. But there is a significant difference. Simply put, there is no reason to think that it need be particularly expensive to eliminate disrespect and misrecognition towards racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities. But insofar as accommodation and reconstruction of the built environment are necessary to eliminate disrespect and misrecognition towards people with disabilities, relational justice for people with disabilities may require diverting significant resources from other causes. In that sense, achieving justice for people with disabilities requires us to directly address the relationship between relational justice and distributive justice to a degree that achieving justice for members of other groups generally does not.

To be sure, the costs associated with accommodation and reconstruction of the built environment need not be understood as compensation for the alleged deficits of people with disabilities. Indeed, they would have to be acknowledged even if disabilities were seen as intrinsically neutral physical or mental characteristics that merely differ from those of a majority of the population. In any society whose physical structures and social practices are designed for average or typical members, people with disabilities will be disadvantaged just because of their minority status. A similar point has been made by feminist scholars, who have pointed out the structural discrimination of workplaces and public settings designed exclusively for men. The expenses of additional restrooms, stalls, or pumping stations do not compensate women for their deficiencies. They simply accommodate differences ignored in a society that saw a woman’s place as in the home (Wendell 1996; Wasserman 1998: 178–179).

Still, the rectification of such structural discrimination may raise more difficult issues for people with disabilities than for women, because there is greater uncertainty and potential for disagreement about the extent of the changes that are required to treat people with disabilities as social and political equals. Indeed, the range and variety of physical and mental differences within a society raise issues of distributive justice that have no obvious analogue for other stigmatized groups. A “gender-neutral” environment can be readily conceived, and achieved at modest cost. In contrast, disability scholars and activists have not specified what it would mean to achieve an “ability-neutral” environment—one that was no more advantageous to people with some physical and mental characteristics than others. And some argued that the ideas of an “ability-neutral” environment is either conceptually incoherent or prohibitively expensive (Barclay 2011, 2018). Moreover, it seems likely that questions about the extent to which justice requires reconstructing or modifying the built environment would arise with respect to people with disabilities even in a society with no history of invidious attitudes or practices toward such persons. By contrast, it seems less likely that such questions would arise in a society with no history of sexism, for example.

Justice for people with disabilities, then, appears to raise questions about the relationship between distributive justice and relational justice that justice for other stigmatized groups does not. Yet the need for redistribution hardly reduces the importance of recognition in achieving justice. Indeed, the complex, disputed relationship between the two makes disability a significant challenge for theories of justice.

“Disability” is typically defined in terms of two elements: (i) a physical or mental characteristic labeled or perceived as an impairment or dysfunction, and (ii) a significant personal or social limitation associated with that characteristic. The relationship between these two elements—and the role of the environment in mediating them—is a core issue in the conceptualization of, and social response to, disability. The medical model treats disability as an individual physical or mental characteristic with significant personal and social consequences. In particular, it sees the limitations faced by people with disabilities as resulting primarily or solely from their impairments. By contrast, the various social models see disability as a relationship between individuals and their social environments: physical and mental characteristics are limiting only or primarily in virtue of social practices that lead to the exclusion of people with those characteristics. This exclusion is manifested not only in deliberate segregation, but in built environments and social practices that restrict the participation of people regarded as having disabilities (see SEP entry on disability: definitions, models, experience ).

In their extreme forms, which treat the impairment or environment (respectively) as the sole cause of personal and social limitation, the medical and social models have few, if any, defenders. Rather, they mark the limits of possible relationships between impairment and limitation. Almost all writers on disability acknowledge some role for both the impairment and the environment in causing limitations; the disagreement largely concerns the assessment of their comparative contribution, and their interaction. Most scholars who embrace some version of the social model acknowledge that impairments—generally but not universally understood as deviations from species-relative statistical norms—can be sources of discomfort and limitation even in the absence of disadvantaging social practices (e.g., Shakespeare 2006, Thomas 2004). These scholars would argue, however, that such adverse effects are far less damaging than social exclusion, are greatly magnified by hostile environments, and could be significantly reduced by more inclusive environments. The medical model is less often explicitly defended than unreflectively adopted—by health care professionals, bioethicists, and philosophers who ignore or underestimate the contribution of social and other environmental factors to the limitations faced by people with disabilities. Even among these groups, however, there is a growing awareness of the environmental contribution to disability and a partial embrace of the social model (Cureton and Brownlee 2009).

To the extent that it is held by anyone in unalloyed form, the medical model of disability would not deny that disability raises issues of justice. Indeed, that model might give support to the view that the disadvantages perceived as inherent to disability raise some of the most urgent claims of justice (Barclay 2011, 2018). But such a model does not recognize any principled rationale for preferring reconstruction of the social and built environment over compensation or correction as a means for correcting disability-related disadvantage, a point made by Wolff (2009a, 2009b), among others. In contrast, the social model strongly supports such a rationale, since it construes many aspects of disability-related disadvantage as essentially connected to various forms of literal and figurative exclusion. Relatedly, the social model construes reconstruction as a public good: more accessible structures and more inclusive practices can be enjoyed by a wide variety of people with and without disabilities (Scotch and Schriner 1997). But such reconstruction also helps to achieve a fairer distribution of tangible and intangible goods, particularly social and economic opportunities.

Some critics accuse social model theorists of assuming that any disadvantage caused by the social environment is ipso facto unjust (Samaha 2007). This assumption would reflect an oversimplified view of the relationship between causing disadvantage and creating injustice. The fact that social structures or practices cause disadvantage does not imply that there is a duty of justice to correct or compensate for the disadvantage. That will depend on the costs of alleviating it, and—under any plausible theory of justice—some comparison with the advantages and disadvantages that would result from alternative social arrangements. Thus, for example, choosing to spend the bulk of a municipal arts budget on a concert hall rather than an art museum may disadvantage those who cannot hear. But that disadvantage, although caused by a social decision, is not necessarily unjust. That will depend, inter alia , on the availability of non-auditory forms of aesthetic experience and the comparative costs of building the museum instead. To take another example, placing ramps and elevators in new high-rise buildings is relatively inexpensive and beneficial to most users, whereas placing them in nineteenth century walk-ups is difficult and expensive; holding public meetings or events in buildings with ramps and elevators has negligible costs, whereas moving an existing business from a building that lacks them to one that has them may be very expensive (Samaha 2007; Wasserman 2001).

The difficulty of inferring injustice from socially caused disadvantage is clear in contexts where greater social provision secures incremental advantage. In such contexts, the question of how much is just will not always have an obvious answer. For example, it would at least marginally benefit wheelchair-users to have additional restricted parking spaces, but we could hardly infer an injustice from the fact that an institution provided N rather than N + 1 such spaces. Intuitively, the allotment should be proportionate to the number of wheelchair users in the community or at the facility, but that number may be uncertain, and a range of spaces would likely satisfy any proportionality requirement. [ 1 ] In deciding how many spaces are enough, we would receive no guidance from the indisputable fact that any disadvantage or advantage in this context would have social causes.

Conversely, the fact that social arrangements do not cause or contribute to a disadvantage does not insulate it from claims of justice; the failure to alleviate that disadvantage may be unjust on plausible accounts of justice. Thus, although many “natural” disasters like Hurricanes Katrina owe much of their destructive impact to social arrangements, it is plausible that the state’s duty to support the victims of hurricanes and tsunamis is not contingent on its responsibility for causing or exacerbating them (Wasserman 2001). [ 2 ] Indeed, as we discuss below, various forms of luck egalitarianism do not distinguish between disadvantages caused versus merely not corrected by society’s institutions, provided that the relevant disadvantages are equally severe and equally unchosen by those disadvantaged.

Nevertheless, the causal claims made by social-model theorists are relevant to justice in several ways. First, as suggested above, for most theories of justice, the mere fact that the social environment can be modified in ways that alleviate the disadvantages associated with impairment places demands for their alleviation within the scope of justice—as claims that a theory of justice must consider and weigh. Second, the fact that those disadvantages are caused by social arrangements is relevant for those theories that regard society as having a stronger duty not to create or aggravate disadvantages than it has to prevent or correct them (Wasserman 2001, Schemmel 2012). Finally, alleviating the disadvantages attributable to prejudice or stigma will enjoy priority on any theory of justice that treats disadvantage resulting from prejudice or stigma as a greater injustice than innocently-created disadvantage. [ 3 ]

Beyond a shared concern with the social causation of disability, different versions of the social model emphasize different features of the exclusionary structures and practices (see SEP entry on disability: definitions, models, experience ). The minority group model regards people with impairments as a stigmatized minority group. It holds that the main reason people with disabilities encounter special hardships is that they face discrimination akin to that faced by racial or ethnic minorities (Hahn 1987, Oliver 1990). The human variation model holds that many of the challenges faced by disabled people do not result from deliberate exclusion, but from a mismatch between their characteristics and the physical and social environment (Scotch and Schriner 1997). These two versions of the social model differ mainly in emphasis. The discrimination stressed by the minority group model generally leads to, and is expressed in, the societal failure to accommodate people with stigmatized differences. Yet the failure to fully accommodate people with various differences, from extreme height to intellectual impairment, does not necessarily arise from stigma. But often, disparities in access that were initially caused by resource or technological limits are maintained by stigma. For example, an employer’s initial purchase of communications technology inaccessible to blind or deaf employees may be explained by the fact that accessible technology had not been developed at the time of purchase. But those historic facts would not justify the employer’s refusal to include modestly priced accessibility features when purchasing upgrades a decade later, for example.

Both versions of the social model require the removal of barriers and practices serving to exclude people with disabilities, and the reconstruction of the environment to more fully include them. Under a minority-group model, these measures are dictated primarily by a demand for recognition and respect, and for the correction of past expressions of disrespect found in the knowing exclusion of people with disabilities from many aspects of social, political, and economic life. The human variation model puts less weight on the expressive or symbolic significance of past exclusion. Rather than construing people with disabilities as a “discrete and insular minority” created by practices of more or less deliberate exclusion, the human variation model construes people with disabilities as simply people who differ in degree from the majority of statistically normal population with respect to one or more physical or mental characteristics. The purpose of reconstruction is not so much to end specific exclusionary practices as to create a more inclusive physical and social environment. Given this difference in emphasis, it is natural to understand the human variation model as appealing principally to norms of distributive fairness, ensuring equal or adequate access to the physical and social environment, in contrast to the minority group model, which appeals more explicitly to norms of respect and recognition.

The demand for greater inclusiveness is less categorical than the demand to eliminate discrimination. Although any environment can be made more inclusive, none can be fully inclusive for everyone (Barclay 2010, 2018). This is not necessarily because, as Barclay, following Shakespeare (2006), claims, the inclusionary features required for one impairment often conflict with those required by another. Such conflicts may be minor, temporary, and remediable. The problem is more general: 1) for many characteristics, from height to mathematical aptitude, one “size” does not fit all; 2) providing different sizes increases fit for a wider range of variation, but at increasing cost (albeit less than often assumed); and 3) it is frequently impractical, and may arguably be unjust, to ensure that everyone is equally well-or ill-fitted; it may, for example, be too expensive to ensure that left-handed or extremely tall individuals suffer no inconvenience in being statistical minorities. Full inclusion, like universal design, is an ideal—one that cannot be fully achieved, and that must be compromised in the partial satisfaction of other legitimate claims.

Even if it would be impossible or unreasonable to achieve full inclusion through wholesale changes in the physical or social environment, modest changes could significantly increase inclusion at little cost. Some examples come from a study of environment modification for autistic individuals (Owren 2013). Some people with autism face significant barriers to taking part in routine social activities: they find such familiar stimuli as applause, light touching, and deodorant as highly aversive; they must be explicitly instructed about social expectations because they cannot “read” most facial expressions or social clues. The study’s author recognizes that the “neurotypical majority” cannot be expected to give up applause, light touching, or even deodorant, let alone nuance in communication:

What would be lost? Large parts of what may be some of the most treasured areas of communication: the art of innuendo, the double meaning at the heart of much comedy, irony, the implied meaning at the heart of so much poetry,… flirtation and “feeling each other out” before committing to something that cannot be retracted. (2013: 23-24)

At the same time, the author points out that the majority could often gain from more modest accommodations.

Many neurotypicals might profit from being more explicit and from others being more explicit, as can be illustrated by the extensive focus in couples therapy on getting partners to state their needs and expectations more explicitly, not relying on other to pick up on “vaguely described, implied, or unspoken behavioral expectations”. (2013: 92)

The author suggests (2013: 111) that it may be feasible to develop “best practices”: “strategies for enhancing accessibility and reducing sensory issues in a larger scale” without unduly burdening the majority:

One strategy might be to incorporate into Universal design the practice of providing access to low stimulation areas in mainstream settings. Another might be to create more public acceptance of autistic behaviors like stimming, [ 4 ] which seem to help many autistic people reduce the impact of aversive sensory stimuli.… (2013: 111)

Such strategies clearly involve tradeoffs, but those tradeoffs would involve small economic and social costs for a majority to achieve large gains in inclusion for a minority. The claim that it is impossible to achieve, or even understand, full inclusion for people with autism does not deny that there is significant injustice in their current state of social isolation.

The challenges for social models of disability for justice may seem greatest for intellectual and psychiatric impairments, as well as for complex physical impairments such as fibromyalgia, multiple chemical sensitivity, and other conditions that radically and unpredictably affect energy, stamina, and functioning (Wendell 1989, 1996; Davis 2005). First, these conditions strikingly display both aspects of impairment, as markers for stigma and as sources of functional limitation (see SEP entry, disability: definitions, models, experience ). Cognitive and psychiatric impairments evoke some of the strongest prejudice and all present some of the most difficult functional limitations, e.g., on the capacities to engage in practical reasoning, to recognize the intentions and attitudes of other people, or to participate in shared activities.Second, some theorists contend that these conditions pose more of a practical challenge for the social model than even the most severe physical disabilities, in part because the measures required for greater inclusion are not as concrete or tangible, and may demand greater imagination to envision and implement. [ 5 ]

Although significant practical work has been done in educational and workplace inclusion, philosophers have been daunted by the challenge of social reconstruction for cognitive disabilities. Thus Jonathan Wolff, who generally favors such reconstruction—which he calls “status enhancement”—as the most respectful intervention, asks

What would it mean to change the world so that people with cognitive disabilities and other people were equally able to find a worthwhile place in the world? Can we even imagine what this would be? (2009a: 407)

Many rights and privileges are thought to require a certain level of cognitive capacity, e.g., the right to vote or contract (Wikler 1979). Similarly, most jobs are structured to require regular hours, uninterrupted activity, undivided attention, and general sociability.

How much should a society modify these requirements or restructure these activities to include people with various intellectual, psychiatric, and complex physical disabilities? A total relaxation of such requirements would impose large, even “unduly burdensome” costs. However, many modifications to promote the inclusion of people with significant cognitive impairments would also benefit people with typical cognitive function: simplified task explanations, warning labels, news copy, and jury instructions. Many accommodations employers are already making to increase flexibility and reduce stress, from individually-tailored schedules to telecommuting, would ease the entry of people with these disabilities into the workplace. There is a growing body of practical and policy work that applies social models of disability to people with intellectual, psychiatric, and complex physical impairments (e.g., Biklen 1992; Block 2006; Connor et al. 2008; Hehir 2002).

As discussed later in this Entry, there is sharp disagreement about whether individuals with the most severe intellectual impairments qualify as subjects of justice. But even if individuals with the most substantial intellectual impairments are regarded as subjects of justice, what justice demands for them, and of them, may be uncertain or disputed. Nussbaum (2009) contends that the equal citizenship of those individuals requires that they be enabled to exercise such political rights as voting and jury service through appropriate surrogates. Wasserman and McMahan (2012) question whether those rights could be meaningfully exercised by surrogates for individuals with the most severe intellectual disabilities.

Some philosophical intimation of a social model approach to cognitive disability can be found in Dan Wikler’s 1979 essay, “Paternalism and the Mildly Retarded”. Wikler held that the category of cognitive disability was socially constructed by the competence thresholds set for important social activities, such as signing a contract or voting in an election. But although society chooses, in this sense, who will be cognitively impaired, it does not have unlimited flexibility, since there can be significant social costs in altering those thresholds. The issue, Wikler concluded, was ultimately one of justice; of fairly distributing the burdens of setting thresholds that will be too high for some or too low for others. Yet Wikler questioned whether justice would require, or even permit, the kind of modifications necessary for significantly greater participation. Writing two decades later, Wolff cited Wikler in stating,

the fact is that what makes much of modern life possible now relies on binding and enforceable contracts that in turn assume a certain level of intellectual competence. To change the world so that such a bar is lowered would have tremendous costs. (2009a: 407)

This pessimism has prevailed in the years since Wikler wrote, and there has been little philosophical attention to practical possibilities for the inclusion of people with cognitive impairments. Although there have been interesting discussions of this issue in the context of education (e.g., Howe 1996; Ladenson 2005; Veatch 1986), the general issue has tended to be dealt with in summary fashion. (Exceptions include Kittay and Carlson 2010; Hartley 2009a; Silvers and Francis 2009; Wong 2007, 2009.) Thus, for cognitive disabilities, Wolff emphasizes “targeted resource enhancement” rather than status enhancement, arguing for an entitlement scheme that gives people with cognitive disabilities maximum possible control over an individual budget for personal assistance and social support (2009a: 407–413). He does regard some forms of status enhancement, notably antidiscrimination measures, “as essential”, but he accepts Wikler’s conclusion that broader changes in social practice carry “intolerable costs” (2009a: 413).

In their influential book From Chance to Choice , Buchanan et al. (2000) repeat the assertion that there would be excessive social costs in reconstructing society to permit the full participation of people with significant cognitive impairments. They compare the reconstruction of society for greater inclusion with a family decision to play only the card games that a young child can understand. They contend that just as adults will tire of a constant game of Go Fish, the society will be “dumbed down” if it refashions itself to fully include people with cognitive impairments.

Although the meaning of inclusion is debatable, and different forms of inclusion will have differing value for different people, the card-game analogy oversimplifies the challenge. To present inclusion as a zero-sum allocation is to dumb down the incredibly complex task of rearranging society to respect and nurture all its members. The analogy assumes that every activity must be done by everyone, which is false.

A more apt analogy to organized social activity might be an assortment of games that can be played by different combinations of people in different ways. Some games could be played by everyone; others could be modified to include cognitively impaired people in a way that preserved the interest of non-disabled players; some would be beyond the reach of people with certain cognitive impairments. But even the most cognitively gifted individuals could not participate in all games—the sheer amount of training and practice required to master some of them, and the considerable time and energy many of them require, would preclude participation in many or most. Indeed, society may function better if people have varying aptitudes for, and interests in, different activities. (A similar criticism of the card-game analogy is offered by Wong (2007), who recounts how her brother with Down enriched rather than impoverished family life.) The fact that a smaller set of activities may be available to people with cognitive impairments need not present a problem, if it does not result in their social isolation or deny them intellectual challenges (Parens & Asch 2000: 25–26 [quoting Philip Ferguson, personal correspondence]). But ensuring their participation may require society to refashion itself in significant ways.

It is not clear that such refashioning would impose the “intolerable costs” feared by Wolff. Social inclusion does not require, for example, that individuals with significant cognitive impairments be able to make binding contracts in every domain of law and business; it requires that competence standards be graduated to reflect the complexity of specific tasks so that those individuals are not categorically excluded –a suggestion made more than two decades ago by the authors of the card-game metaphor (Buchanan and Brock 1990). Social model theorists know full well that impairments—physical as well as cognitive—differ from skin color in that they are sometimes relevant to what people can do, as are such other attributes as education and income. But that feature of impairment hardly precludes social reconstruction. Indeed, the most effective rebuttal to the card-game metaphor may be found in the practical work that already has been done in educational and workplace inclusion (e.g., Biklen 1992; Block 2006; Hehir 2002; McGuire et al. 2006). At the same time, it bears emphasis that the social model of disability was originally conceptualized in terms of physical disabilities. And there may be significant limitations on the extent to which it applies to cognitive disabilities. More generally, although it may be useful to speak of “the” social model of “disability”, the diversity of impairments that fall under the extension of “disability” suggests that the aptness of the social model in any given context will vary depending on the nature of the impairments at issue.

As suggested in §1 , the disabling impact of social arrangements may be relevant to the type and scope of interventions that justice requires. In stressing the impact and the malleability of the environment, social-model theorists have shifted the focus from claims for correction and compensation to claims for reconstruction.

Consider a society with much greater height variation than our own. Even if very tall or short stature was neither stigmatized nor functionally limiting, that society would, on any plausible theory of justice, be obliged to construct its public spaces, buildings, and vehicles to accommodate them. They would be treated unjustly if the construction of the physical environment took no account of them, especially if the failure to do so caused them significant disadvantage. Of course, the extent to which their height differences needed to be taken into account would depend on the distribution of height in the society, as well as on its level of resources and competing needs. No plausible theory of justice would require that the built environment be equally accommodating to all heights, if such a thing were possible, but all would condemn some environments as unjustly restrictive. What even this simple case suggests is that the demand for a more inclusive environment need not be seen in terms of compensating individuals, tall or impaired, for their internal deficits, but of accommodating as wide as possible a range of human variation.

Even if environmental reconstruction should not be seen as compensating for deficits, a question remains about the extent to which it should be seen as a matter of redistribution or recognition. This question is raised by the legal requirement of “reasonable accommodation”. Under the ADA and ADAAA, “accommodations” include ramps, elevators, texts in multiple formats, sign-language interpreters, flexible work schedules, and job coaches or assistance. The failure to make reasonable accommodation for disabled employees or users of public facilities constitutes, with some notable exceptions, discrimination (ADA 1990). There is no reference to that concept in the laws banning discrimination on the basis of race, sex, or age; the term was introduced in cases addressing claims of religious discrimination (see, e.g., Karlan and Rutherglen 1996). Like practitioners of minority religions, but unlike women, people of color, or older people, people with disabilities must be “reasonably accommodated”.

For the human variation model, reasonable accommodation requires changes in the physical and social environment, from installing ramps to modifying work schedules and altering the location of meetings and classes. Often, such changes require little more than flexibility and imagination. But some of these changes can be expensive; at some point, the cost may make further change unreasonable. On this approach, the legislative understanding of such accommodation as a matter of distributive justice is reflected in the qualifying use of “reasonable” and the exemption of accommodations that would impose an “undue” burden or hardship on the entity required to make accommodations (Wasserman 1998).

But it is also possible to see reasonable accommodation as a requirement of equality for people with disabilities without recourse to a theory of distributive justice (e.g., Crossley 2004; Karlan and Rutherglen 1996). Accommodating religious practices may be expensive in various ways, but no one regards doing so either as compensating religions for their deficits. Indeed, such a rationale would appear to violate the state’s constitutionally-mandated neutrality among religions. Rather, because the state is required to treat religions and their adherents with equal respect and concern (Dworkin 2003), it disfavors rules and practices that interfere with religious observance. Somewhat similarly, a state that regards people with disabilities with equal respect and concern will disfavor arrangements that interfere with their participation. With respect to both groups, substantive equality may require unequal provisions. In the case of disability as well as religion, how much additional provision is required is indeterminate, not for lack of a complete theory of justice to specify the amount or proportion, but because the demands of equal respect are indeterminate.

Consider, for example, the question of how much it is reasonable for a small business to spend on an elevator or ground-floor space to be able to employ a talented IT technician with emphysema. To answer that question, we might do better to decide what respect for that person demands, based in part on current social practice and convention, rather than to consult a comprehensive but abstract theory of distributive justice. In any case, it may be unreasonable to expect a determinate answer; it may be appropriate to rely on a fair procedure to select among a range of plausible outcomes. But by the same token, the utter lack of accommodation in many workplaces and public facilities is clearly unjust on any plausible theory of justice.

The debate over the accommodations available for a minority group may often reflect a complex mix of claims concerning redistribution and recognition. For example, people in wheelchairs are sometimes provided restaurant access only through the service entrance. The restaurant owners often claim that such access is quite reasonable, since the service entrances already have ramps—a distributive consideration. Disability advocates claim that however convenient it may be for the owners, such access treats wheelchair users as second-class customers—a claim of misrecognition. In this case, it may seem that the recognition claims clearly trump the conflicting distributional claims. But this will not always be the case.

Again, resolving such conflicts may involve the same kind of judgment employed in debates over accommodating minority religious practices. It may be that some jobs cannot be made available to people whose Sabbath falls on Friday or Saturday, because (in light of demographic considerations) the essential functions of those jobs require working on those days. But although the “essential function” standard appears objective and determinate, it is often subject to distributive considerations, e.g., about staffing requirements and business volume. A refusal to sustain the slightest loss of revenue to accommodate any minority religion might be a distributive injustice; a willingness to sustain greater losses to accommodate Jewish and Adventist employees than Muslim ones might involve misrecognition as well—the failure to treat Islamic practice as having the same value as other religious practices. Similarly, the violation of the ADA involved in refusing to display the same flexibility for disabled as for pregnant employees arguably constitutes both distributive injustice and misrecognition.

The uncertainty about the distributive character of reasonable accommodation suggests that in the case of disability, it may often be difficult to sharply distinguish claims for redistribution and recognition. [ 6 ] Recognition may require redistribution, and redistribution should aim at securing recognition. Asch (1989) has gone even further, arguing that recognition must precede redistribution; that if people with disabilities were recognized as equals, capable of significant contributions to others, society would be more willing to adopt appropriate measures for redistribution and reconstruction.

4. Disability in Contemporary Theories of Justice

The resurgence of philosophical interest in justice is often dated to the publication of John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice in 1971. Although that was only two years before the passage of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, embodying a social model of disability (see SEP entry, disability: definitions, models, experience ), it was well before the academic reconceptualization of disability as a social phenomenon. For the 25 years after A Theory of Justice , many justice theorists tacitly accepted the medical model (e.g., Dworkin 1981a,b; Daniels 1985). They treated disability as a physical or mental limitation of the individual, the principal cause of disability-related disadvantage. Disability thus posed a problem for justice theories based on mutual advantage, hypothetical agreement, or material or social equality. People with disabilities did not appear to offer reciprocal advantages; they complicated the task of reaching a hypothetical agreement on the basic structure of society; and they made the goal of equality seem impossibly demanding.

By the late 1990s, some mainstream political philosophers were becoming acquainted with social models of disability, and some disability theorists were gaining a hearing among political philosophers. Some philosophers sought to modify distributive theories of justice to take account of the social and environmental character of disability; others cited the failure of those theories to take appropriate account of disability as one reason to reject exclusively distributive approaches.

Before describing these developments, it is useful to distinguish two types of distributive theories. Modern social contract theories, notably Rawls’ (1971), seek to determine the fair terms of social cooperation to which individuals (generally with limited knowledge of their own situations) would agree; they argue that certain distributive principles would be among those terms (Rawls’ “difference principle” may be the most familiar). Rawlsian theories are procedural in one sense: they regard any distribution as just if and only if it is consistent with the distributive principles that would be chosen by those individuals. Disability-oriented criticism of these theories has focused on their assumptions about the individuals who are eligible to make a hypothetical contract or participate in the cooperative scheme it establishes. Critics have argued for the eligibility of people with disabilities or their representatives to participate in the contract-making processes and resulting cooperative scheme more than about the validity of the principles or rules yielded by that process (Richardson 2006; Silvers and Francis 2005; Stark 2007). The second type of theory is primarily interested in outcomes; in the kind of end state a just society should strive for: either equality on some outcome metric or the reduction of certain kinds of inequality. Here, disability-informed criticism has favored outcome metrics that take account of the social contribution to disability-related disadvantage, and standards for just distributions that are oriented toward disrespectful inequalities (Anderson 1999; Nussbaum 2006a; Wolff 2009b).

Within social contract theories, a distinction is often drawn between contractarian/Hobbesian and contractualist/Lockean accounts (see SEP entry on contractarianism ). One way to characterize this distinction is in terms of the parties’ motivation and interaction. In the former, they are narrowly self-interested and hard-bargaining; in the latter, their self-interest is tempered or balanced by their commitment to justifying themselves to others, and they proceed by deliberating rather than by bargaining. This distinction is often formulated in terms of a distinction between (merely) rational agents, and “reasonable” agents.

A Rawlsian approach might seem more congenial than a Hobbesian approach to people with disabilities. It derives the basic structure of society from a hypothetical choice situation, the Original Position, in which a veil of ignorance precludes reliance on the contractors’ actual limitations—limitations that a Hobbesian contractor might ruthlessly (albeit rationally, if not reasonably) exploit (cf. note 10 ). Although the parties themselves are motivated exclusively by considerations of self-interest, which Rawls understands in terms of the fulfillment of two higher-order interests (see SEP Entry on the original position ), the informational constraints of the Original Position compel the parties to motivate as if they are reasonable, at least in the sense that it compels them to be impartial between the claims of all who will be subject to the principles they choose.

But even if Rawlsian contractors do not know their specific limitations, they do know that they, or the individuals they represent, are not permanently disabled. Rawls stipulated that the idealized society whose “basic structure” was the subject of hypothetical agreement was restricted to members who would be “fully-cooperating” over the course of their adult lives. Rawls assumed that this restriction would exclude people with severe and permanent physical and mental disabilities (Rawls 1993: 18–20). He did not defend that assumption, nor provide for the representation of those people in the process by which the basic structure of society is to be determined. Instead, he consigned their fate to the later, legislative phase. Rawls also restricted participation in the Original Position to those with two “moral powers”: the capacity to form and revise one’s own conception of the good; and the capacity for a sense of justice, the capacity to act on and apply fair terms of cooperation ( ibid .). It is doubtful that these powers can be attributed to people with the most severe intellectual and psychiatric impairments, although some philosophers and disability scholars have argued that a just society should treat all human beings as having the potential to develop such functioning (Wong 2007, 2009).

Disability scholars have been particularly critical of these eligibility conditions for the Original Position. If the deliberators in the Original Position do not believe that they could be representing, or could turn out to actually be, people with “severe and permanent” disabilities when the veil is lifted, they will have no prudential reason to choose a basic structure for their society that will provide for the inclusion of those people. Indeed, insofar as such measures would impose costs on people with non-disabilities, the parties will have prudential reasons not to support such measures, since doing so would undermine the interests of people whom they know they could represent (the able-bodied on whom the costs are imposed) for the sake of those whom they explicitly know they don’t represent (the disabled for whom the costs are imposed).

Several philosophers sympathetic to the Rawlsian framework have suggested modifications that would give people with disabilities a greater and more direct role in the social contracting process. Some have argued that the “full cooperation” requirement, and the kind of reciprocity it involves, can be liberally interpreted so as not to exclude most people with significant physical disabilities (Hartley 2009b; Stark 2009). Henry Richardson has gone even further, maintaining that “Rawls’ arguments making use of the device of the [Original Position] do not essentially depend on any reciprocity premise” (2006: 427). He examines modified versions of the Original Position that drop the assumption that no one has severe and permanent disabilities. He contends that with such modifications, the Original Position can yield principles more sensitive to disability concerns about the continuous nature of abilities, the stigmatization resulting from false dichotomization, and the exclusion of severely disabled human beings.

In response, Martha Nussbaum (2006b: 490–498) concedes that Richardson’s proposed reconstruction of Rawls would largely avoid the exclusionary features of the OP to which disability scholars have objected. But she argues that this reconstruction is a more radical departure from Rawls than Richardson acknowledges. She suggests that the theory loses its contractual character if it dispenses, per Richardson, with the reciprocity requirement and the assumption that the contractors have roughly equal physical and mental powers.

Rawls’ “moral powers” condition has posed further problems. Harry Brighouse (2001) observes that modifying the cooperation requirement still excludes those whose cognitive impairments preclude their possession of the two moral powers. Sophia Wong (2009, 2007) argues that those powers can be acquired by people with severe intellectual impairments, with adequate social support. Leslie Francis (2009) and Anita Silvers (Silvers and Francis 2009) contend that many individuals with severe cognitive impairments can collaborate with others to construct individualized, authentic conceptions of the good. Silvers and Francis (2005) and Christie Hartley (2009a) also maintain that people with severe intellectual impairments can be represented adequately in a contracting process that consists in trust-building more than hard bargaining, even if they cannot participate in it personally.

Others have argued that exclusion from the Original Position need not adversely affect people with disabilities or treat them with disrespect. Adam Cureton (2008) argues that the exclusion of people with severe disabilities from the Original Position is just part of its idealization, and does not diminish the urgency or priority of their claims. Cynthia Stark (2007) proposes lifting the full-cooperation requirement to include people with disabilities at the second stage of Rawlsian deliberation, where the society’s constitution is established and where the hypothetical decision makers acquire some knowledge about the resources, development level, and other characteristics of their society.

The plausibility of these responses to Rawls depends to some extent on which version of the Original Position we consider. Rawls made a change in his presentation of the Original Position in his Restatement (2001) that is especially pertinent to people with cognitive disabilities. He emphasized that the participants in the Original Position are representatives of people in the future society, not people living in the future society denied knowledge of their social position. If representatives were made to take into account the possibility that those they represent might be disabled, this might help to ensure that the interests of the disabled were represented. It would only do so, however, if the contractors have the ability to imagine the very different embodiments of people with a variety of disabilities, an ability feminist critics of Rawls have questioned with respect to men representing women (Young 1990; Benhabib 1992; Okin 1994). The strictly representational role of participants in the Original Position would also avoid the conflict of interest faced by cognitively unimpaired individuals representing themselves and cognitively impaired individuals.

More broadly, philosophers have varied widely in their optimism about the prospects for including people with disabilities in contractarian or contractualist deliberations. On the one hand, Lawrence Becker (2005) suggests that even selfish, hard-bargaining contractarians (his “tough crowd”) would accept an expansive notion of “reciprocity”, one that would ensure adequate provision for people with disabilities in the scheme of social cooperation they adopt. Their acceptance of reciprocity would arise from recognition of the needs and vulnerabilities they and their loved ones have or will likely acquire. That recognition places a premium on social provisions for health.

Even for the tough crowd, health is now ripe for inclusion in the list of basic goods. And it may be that a robust social commitment to health will address questions of justice for the disabled—as long as we are careful to include fundamental aspects of psychological health (i.e., those associated with active rational agency…. (2005: 35)

Members of the tough crowd may not be so careful, however. Indeed, some may not even regard “active rational agency” as a matter of health as they more narrowly construe it, with an emphasis on physical survival and comfort. In contrast to Becker, Eva Kittay (1999) holds that even the most liberal interpretation of Rawls’ scheme will not be sufficiently responsive to the egalitarian concerns that motivate his theory. Rawls’ assumption that the participants in the original position are or represent fully productive members of society neglects the fact of pervasive, inevitable human dependency. “[T]hose within relationships of dependency fall outside the conceptual perimeters of Rawls’ egalitarianism” (1999: 79).

Another debate within contractarian theories that has particular relevance to disability concerns the scope of justice itself: Is justice concerned only with the distribution of social goods, or also with the rectification of “natural inequalities” (Pogge 1989: 44–47). Pogge (1995) argues that in the Original Position, it would be irrational for parties to ignore the contribution of natural advantages to the well-being (understood in terms of the fulfillment of the two “higher-order interests”) of prospective citizens, since from that standpoint, it is just as bad to be disadvantaged by uncompensated disabilities as it is to be disadvantaged (to the same degree) by a small share of social primary goods. But Pogge claims that attempting to eliminate those inequalities would go beyond the scope of justice. Some philosophers argue, however, that many natural inequalities are within the scope of justice, and that health care to mitigate them is a requirement of justice (Daniels 1985; Buchanan et al. 2000).

Other philosophers and disability scholars would deny that the inequalities associated with impairments can be regarded as “natural” (Amundson 1992; Wasserman 2001). In questioning the very notion of “natural inequalities”, they join a broader philosophical debate about whether it is possible to draw a coherent distinction between natural and artificial or social inequalities (see Lippert-Rasmussen 2004; Nagel 1997; Pogge 2004a,b; Aas and Wasserman, 2016). [ 7 ] Even if such a distinction can be plausibly drawn, it may turn out that many or most inequalities in abilities are artificial: as with of obsolete skills, those inequalities may be largely attributable to the physical and social environment (Bickenbach 1993).

Other distributive theories of justice take a less procedural approach than Rawls. They are directly concerned with the kinds of outcomes a just society should pursue. These theories differ in the outcome metrics they adopt—the “currency” of distributive justice (Cohen 1989). Some adopt a resource metric (Dworkin 1981b); still others, a metric based on opportunities for welfare (Arneson 1989) or access to advantage (Cohen 1989). Finally, capability theories assess outcomes not only by the goods or resources that people have, but also by what people are able to do with what they have (Nussbaum 1990; Sen 1980). Such outcome-oriented theories may be more or less demanding, depending on whether they require equality or merely priority for the worst-off, and on whether they support equality of a sort that may not require the significant redistribution of goods or resources.

The most prominent family of outcome-oriented approaches has been called “luck egalitarianism” (see, for example, Arneson 2000; Dworkin 2003; Lippert-Rasmussen 2015). According to the dominant characterization of that position, its central claim is that it is unjust when there are unfair inequalities in the distribution of “brute luck”—an advantage or disadvantage with respect to the relevant metric that is not attributable to an individual’s fault, choice, or assumption of risk. “Option luck”, in contrast, refers to an advantage or disadvantage an individual acquires through the foreseeable consequences of his or her actions. The stronger versions of luck egalitarianism (e.g., Dworkin 81b) deny that any inequality resulting from option luck generates claims of justice. On those versions, only some disabilities generate justice claims—those that resulted from brute bad luck (e.g., congenital impairments)—whereas others, which may involve the same or greater disadvantage, do not, simply because they resulted from a free choice (e.g., reckless pastimes or an unhealthy lifestyle).

Some philosophers have taken these implications as a reductio ad absurdum of luck egalitarianism (Anderson 1999), and they would no doubt be rejected by many writers on health care, who have questioned the moral and policy relevance of individual responsibility (Cavallero 2011; Feiring 2008; Galvin 2002; Wikler 1987). The greater concern for disability scholars may be with the conflation of disadvantages resulting from unchosen impairments with disadvantages resulting from unchosen social conditions under the one heading of “bad brute luck”. Luck egalitarianism does not, as such , provide any principled rationale for distinguishing between equally severe setbacks to the well-being of people with disabilities that result from the “bad luck” of being born in a society with disability discrimination and the “bad luck” of being born with an intrinsically disadvantageous set of physical abilities. Both are equally unchosen from the individual’s standpoint, and it is individual responsibility, rather than some combination of individual and collective responsibility, that determines whether a given disadvantage generates a valid justice complaint. This is not to deny that luck egalitarianism can be supplemented to account for the intuition that the “bad luck” of being born in a disabling environment (Fine and Asch 1988) differs morally from less socially mediated forms of bad luck, as we will see in our discussion of the capabilities approach.

The implications of outcome-oriented theories for disability depend on two features of those theories. The first is the metric, or “currency” of justice they adopt—welfare, resources, primary goods, or capabilities. The second is the distributive standard they impose—strict equality, priority for the worse off, or merely some minimum for everyone (sufficientarianism). We will consider these two features in order, although they are sometimes intertwined.

Rawls and other social contract theorists adopted a broad outcome metric for assessing the comparative advantage of the individual in a society: “social primary goods”, which include opportunities, basic liberties, income, and the social bases of self-respect. This breadth is intended to achieve neutrality between competing substantive conceptions of the good, since the social primary goods are construed as “all-purpose means” that are valuable to have irrespective of the content of one’s particular conception of the good. For many disability scholars, the difficulty in this approach does not concern its neutrality, but its failure to take account of the environment in which those goods must be utilized, which may profoundly affect their value to those receiving them. Two persons might be alike in their share of social primary goods, and have similar projects, aims, commitments, and values, but nonetheless differ in the value they can derive from those goods, if one person is disabled and the other is not. As we shall see below, the capabilities approach takes into account this objection, when the difference between the uses to which each person can put her primary goods is construed as the result of differences in “internal resources”, or the rate at which the individual can convert resources to “functionings”.

A failure to take adequate account of the environment may also be found in directly-egalitarian resource-based approaches. Dworkin (1981a,b), for example, appears to take the social environment for granted in proposing a hypothetical division of resources into individual bundles. Giving people with impairments equal material shares in a society like our own would hardly satisfy the demands of equality in a physical and social environment designed exclusively for people with standard endowments. Dworkin is aware of the problem, but his solution is to adjust individual shares to include insurance payouts against poor environmental fit, rather than to redesign the environment to reduce inequalities in fit. To that degree, Dworkin appears to tacitly assume a medical model of disability, according to which limitations resulting from impairments are solely attributable to the impairment itself, and, if not correctable, compensable only by the redistribution of resources to people with such impairments. Such compensation may ensure survival, but it does little to enhance or equalize participation, and may in fact hinder participation if Anderson (1999) is right that compensating for disabilities expresses disrespect. Moreover, the size of the insurance payout for a given disability is determined by the amount by which able-bodied people would be willing to insure themselves against the prospect of incurring that disability. Insofar as the judgments of able-bodied people don’t always track the intuitively relevant facts about disability-related disadvantage, such an approach threatens to “bake in” flawed assumptions about the experience of disability into its account of just entitlements for people with disabilities (Bodenheimer 1997a,b).

Several alternatives for assessing outcomes for purposes of political and social equality seem more responsive to the disabling role of the social environment. The most familiar and influential of these alternatives is the capabilities approach, developed in different ways by Martha Nussbaum (2006a) and Amartya Sen (1980). Their accounts are concerned not only with the resources an individual has but also with what she can do with them; with her “capability” of engaging in a number of valuable “functionings”, such as forming intimate relationships and having rich sensory and aesthetic experiences.

Nussbaum’s earlier formulations of the capabilities placed considerable emphasis on species-typical functioning. For example, she initially treated “the exercise of the five senses” as a necessary constituent of human flourishing. More recent formulations are more congenial to social models of disability, in part because of Nussbaum’s encounter with disability scholarship. She now makes room for the social contribution to “natural” deficits (see Wasserman 1998; Terzi 2009), recognizing that most capabilities bear only a contingent, environmentally-mediated relationship to people’s “natural endowment”. She abstracts from differences between people with impaired and normal limb function to find a common claim to the means of moving about from place to place. Such means may be architectural, vehicular, mechanical, or prosthetic; they may involve making places more accessible or making the individual more mobile. Similarly, a person lacking sight or hearing can achieve aesthetic satisfaction by other means; a person with intellectual impairments can participate in activities structured to include individuals of varying cognitive skills. An individual with emphysema could increase his capacity for affiliation and control over the material environment (two capabilities from Nussbaum’s 2006a list) not only by measures to increase his lung capacity but also by measures to increase his access to social and business venues through better transit and architectural design.

Nussbaum’s broader framing enables her to recognize the prospects for flourishing of people with severe impairments. The plausibility of the capabilities approach for disability critics of distributive accounts lies in the way the capabilities are individuated. A basis for individuation might be found in a comprehensive account of human nature and human flourishing, such as the Aristotelian account that informs Nussbaum’s work. As Becker notes, however, such a comprehensive account would have limited appeal in justifying a distributive scheme in a pluralistic society (2005: 35). Despite its promise, considerably more work is needed to clarify her approach. Another feature of Nussbaum’s theory that some disability theorists find congenial is her incorporation of recognition and respect into her set of basic capabilities. Thus, the capability for “affiliation” encompasses not only intimacy, but self-respect and dignity; the capability for “control over the environment” includes both the material and political environments.

Less ambitiously than Nussbaum, Jonathan Wolff (2009b) classifies equality-enhancing measures for people with disabilities by the extent to which they address recognition as well as redistribution. Thus, the individual limitations of people with disabilities can be addressed with either cash compensation or “personal enhancement”, medical, surgical, or rehabilitative measures to correct those limitations. “Targeted resource enhancement” offers an intermediate option, which tries to improve the fit of the individual and the environment with a range of restricted resources such as personal assistance and assistive technology. Finally, “status enhancement” alters the built environment and social practices to reduce the impact of individual differences in abilities on social equality. Wolff generally favors status enhancement as the most respectful intervention, because it shapes the environment to the needs of all members of society. It is also the most stable intervention, because it protects the social equality against sudden changes in individuals’ levels of functioning.

Although Wolff does not adopt the device of hypothetical decision making to justify a preference for status enhancement, that preference could be underwritten by a suitably modified Original Position. As Richardson (2006) suggests, hypothetical decision makers who know that they may represent individuals with severe impairments are more likely to be concerned with capabilities than with primary goods, since the latter by themselves may be of limited value to those they represent. Further, those decision makers would recognize that capabilities often can be increased more respectfully, as well as more effectively, by status enhancements than by other measures.

Yet doubts remain about the extent to which concerns about recognition, respect, and social equality can be captured in any outcome metric of individual well-being, however broad. Thus, Christian Schemmel (2012) argues that the treatment of people as equals must be understood in terms of respectful relationships among individuals and institutions, and that the presence of such relationships cannot plausibly be regarded in what Pogge (2004a,b) calls “recipient-oriented” terms, as components of individual well-being. The moral significance of respectful treatment is neither exhausted by, nor derivative of, its contribution to individual well-being. As Schemmel argues (2012: 19), people may need some forms of affiliation to flourish but do not necessarily require social and political equality for their own well-being. The plausibility of these claims depends to some extent on how narrow or broad a conception of well-being one adopts. A conception that encompasses virtually all that a person has reason to care about will more easily accommodate social equality and respectful relationships.

Two approaches seek to moderate the ambitions of distributive justice in ways that may be more inclusive of people with disabilities. One takes the end-state of justice not as equality or priority but sufficiency: it requires that every member of society reach some minimum in the appropriate “currency”. This approach, labeled “sufficientarian” by one critic (Arneson 2006), is suggested but not endorsed by Nussbaum, and it serves to make capabilities a less demanding metric for distributive justice. (Nussbaum notes that certain capabilities must be distributed equally if anyone is to have a sufficient level of them, e.g., voting rights.) The requirement that a just society ensure that every citizen reaches a minimum level of each capability may be far less demanding than the requirement of equal capabilities. One way of setting the minimum appeals to the requirements for participation in a democratic society (Gutmann 1987; Anderson 1999).

Although sufficientarian approaches claim to make the demands of justice less oppressive, they have been criticized as demanding both too much and too little. They demand too much if the minimum for every capability must be met in the face of recalcitrant impairments or environments. They demand too little if attaining the minimum could still leave the individual with a miserable life (Arneson 2006; Wasserman 2006; Wolff and de-Shalit 2007). Those approaches have also been criticized for lacking a mechanism for prioritizing capabilities (Wolff and de-Shalit 2007) and for assessing whether the minimum has been reached for any one capability (Riddle 2010). Clearly, the extent to which justice is achievable on such approaches for people with severe disabilities will depend on where the minimum is set, how its satisfaction is assessed, and how the capabilities are defined.

A second approach would replace equality on a specific metric of advantage with social equality or equality of respect (Anderson 1999; Miller 1999; Norman 1997, 1999). This approach would involve a more radical departure from luck egalitarianism than a sufficiency account, since it does not lower the standard for a just distribution so much as propose a non-distributive standard for justice. That standard would see justice in terms of recognition rather than, or as well as, redistribution. Although this approach may demand strict equality of a sort, it is a sort that does not appear to set determinate distributive requirements. A society of social equals, abounding in mutual respect, can arguably tolerate significant disparities in welfare, resources, opportunities, or capabilities.

Underlying this approach is the more fundamental distinction between relational and distributive theories of justice. Although this distinction can be drawn in different ways (see, e.g., Lippert-Rasmussen 2015, Fourie et al. 2015), it identifies two critical dimensions of justice. One concerns how well-off individual people are, both absolutely and in comparison to each other. The other concerns the kinds of social relationships people stand in to one another. As discussed in §4.3 , it is a difficult question to what extent either dimension of justice can be reduced to, or expressed in terms of, the other.

Against the claim that relational justice can be understood as an instance of distributive justice, one may observe that at least with respect to equality, there seems to be an important structural difference between two people standing in some relation to some third thing (i.e., some good) to the same degree and two people standing in some relation to one another to the same degree (e.g., the relation of being respected, recognized, and so on). Insofar as interpersonal equality has a different structure when construed as relational, it is a mistake to think that it can be reduced to a species of distributive equality, for “equal” means something different in each case. For example, it is one thing for any two people in society to have equal respect from others ; it is a different thing for any two people in society to have equal respect for one another. This distinction is relevant to debates about disability in particular, because one way to understand the social model is in terms of the relational view—its core insight is that disability is not a one-place property of individuals, defined in terms of some welfare deficit, but an n-place relation between individuals (n>2) defined by stigmatizing or excluding attitudes, dispositions, practices, and forms of treatment.

Some of these issues have taken center-stage in a recent debate over the expressive significance of different measures to remediate the disadvantages associated with disability. Pogge (2002) and Anderson (1999) have claimed that it is disrespectful to attribute a person’s disadvantage to features of his or her natural endowment because it treats her as needy, deficient, or inferior. For this reason, they argue against justifying redistributive measures to achieve inclusion on the grounds that they correct natural inequalities in skills, talents, or the ability to convert resources into welfare. Instead, they contend that such measures can and should be justified as redressing discrimination, and conversely, that failures to achieve inclusion should be recognized as unjustly discriminatory.

Barclay (2010, 2018) challenges the argument that a claim for redistribution treats the claimant as deficient or inferior. Such claims need only recognize that some traits are less suited than others for specific environments—a contingency that does not imply the intrinsic superiority or inferiority of a given endowment. She thus questions those (e.g, Daniels 1985; Buchanan et al. 2000) who claim that certain characteristics or traits are universally valuable, such that an individual who lacked them would be deficient in any environment. Although she tends to see the environment as fixed rather than malleable, Barclay argues that the project of achieving inclusion is best seen in terms of maximizing individuals’ environmental fit. Achieving that fit may require expending more resources for some individuals than others in any given environment. The demands made by very tall or left-handed people for greater accommodation do not presuppose their inferiority, only their minority status (see §2 , infra). These comparisons suggest that the demands for accommodation of people with such statistically atypical features differ merely in degree, not kind, from those made by people with various impairments.

Even if compensation for disadvantage need bit be demeaning, however, specific grounds for compensation may well be. Laws and policies that compensate people simply because they are disabled, or have a specific disability, may be objectionable because of the social meaning of disability-compensation. Compensation that is based on the medical classification of disability may reinforce the humanity-obscuring stereotype of “the cripple” as helpless and pitiable. This grave threat to social equality should make us wary of drawing distributive implications from the claim that disability is a “bad difference” rather than a “mere difference “(see entry, “Disability: Well-Being, Health, and Personal Relationships”). Even if disability in general, or specific disabilities, were bad differences, that would hardly imply that individuals who had (those) disabilities were entitled to compensation simply by virtue of that fact.

There are many categories or groups into which people can place themselves, and be placed, on the basis of their varying characteristics. The salience and appeal of these categories depend on social and historical context as well as individual preferences and values. Identity and identity politics become important as members of historically excluded groups challenge their status and work for inclusion. Many women gained a sense of group identity in opposing laws that limited voting and other political rights to men; racial identities have been forged in the fight against segregation. Although people with disabilities are not always understood as sharing an identity, their awareness of membership in an oppressed group has been shaped by exclusionary laws and customs, from “ugly laws” prohibiting people with physical deformities from appearing in public to the state-sponsored involuntary sterilization of “mental defectives”. A sense of group identity has been further encouraged by welfare, social security and other laws that place people with various disabilities in a single category, even if they define that category in different ways.

The importance of disability as a social category was increased by the movement to establish civil rights for people with disabilities. As in the case of other stigmatized groups, the characteristics used as a ground for exclusion became a basis for mobilization and a source of pride. The social model of disability, which informed the movement for disability rights, emphasized what people with various impairments have in common—their stigmatization and exclusion—and thereby promoted the emergence of disability as a powerful social identity.

Critics like Fraser argue that the importance of social identity cannot be adequately captured in any metric of individual advantage. An effective social response to stigmatized identities requires both recognition and transformation—changes in cultural framing and social perception that are poorly served by redistribution. An emphasis on redistribution is often self-defeating, exacerbating stigma and reinforcing the impression of the stigmatized group as deficient (Fraser 1995, 1997; see Olsen 2001). Yet as we will discuss, some ways of transforming social identity have significant dangers as well.

For proponents of recognition, one issue is whether justice requires not only respect for individual members of society, but also respect for their group or cultural identities. Must a just society recognize “group-specific cultural identity” or merely “the status of group members as full partners in social interaction” (Fraser 2001: 23, 24)? Are these separate requirements, or does respect for an individual entail respect for her social or cultural identities? These questions have been addressed primarily with respect to religious, ethnic, racial, and sexual minorities. Very little work has been done on the question of what a disability identity would look like and what sorts of recognition claims it would implicate.

A somewhat parallel issue has been raised in distributive justice—must society allocate resources, broadly construed, to support the group and cultural identities of its members? That support could be based on the claim that such identities are a constituent, perhaps an irreducible one, of the well-being of the individual members of society. This claim has been suggested by justice theorists who argue for the importance of culture as a “context of choice” for individuals (e.g., Kymlicka 1989, Sparrow 2005). An individual deprived of a culture through which he has experienced and interpreted the world will find it far more difficult to flourish. As we will discuss, however, it is doubtful that disability in general, or particular impairments, play such a comprehensive role in the lives of many—let alone all—people with disabilities. [ 8 ]

We begin by describing the different characteristics of an individual’s “identity”. One sense of this term is that of numerical identity over time: what makes some person at time t1 the same person as the person at time t2? (see SEP entry on identity over time ). This is, in the first instance, a metaphysical question and not our interest here. A different sense of “identity” refers to those characteristics that make one the particular person one is, as judged both by oneself and by others. This includes narrative, biographical, and practical identities. It is less about criteria for sameness over time and more about the constitutive or defining features of one’s self- (or social) conception. This is the sense of “identity” we will be concerned with.

The sense of individual identity most directly relevant to respect and recognition is arguably that of practical identity. Following Korsgaard (1996, 2009), we can understand a practical identity to be a description under which a person values herself, where valuing oneself involves treating oneself as a source of reasons. For example, someone who identifies as a mother in this sense values herself under the description “mother” and for that reason treats the fact that she is a mother as a source of (normative practical) reasons. Moreover, to “drop” this identification is not like dropping a desire or short-term goal. It involves changing one’s sense of who one is as a person and what gives one’s life value.

On this view, a person’s practical identities should be normatively significant for other people as well. For one thing, many of a person’s significant interests are derived from her practical identities. Since it is uncontroversial that respect and concern require giving appropriate weight to the interests of others, it follows that respect and concern require giving appropriate weight to other people’s practical identities, at least insofar as they generate (legitimate) interests. In addition, respecting a person’s practical identities plausibly falls under a more general requirement of respect for personal autonomy. Personal autonomy is a foundational value of liberal democracies, whose laws and policies do not require individuals to organize their lives around any particular identity, but rather give them the latitude to make of their identities what they will (Appiah 2005; Appiah and Gutmann 1996; see also the SEP entry on identity politics ). This can be seen as a part of liberalism’s broader commitment to neutrality about conceptions of the good (e.g., Rawls 1993).

These issues become especially charged if we move from individual to group identities, bringing us closer to the question of disability identities. As K. Anthony Appiah points out, though individual identity is different from group identity, it nevertheless has a collective or social dimension (Appiah 2005: 21). For example, Palestinians living in the West Bank have a distinct collective identity. This is different from, though certainly compatible with, some specific West Bank resident having as part of his individual identity being a Palestinian. [ 9 ] It is important to bear this distinction between individual and collective identities in mind, because the latter, to a greater extent than the former, is imposed or “ascribed” by the larger society rather than chosen by the individual.

Being disabled, like being a member of a minority race, subjects one to particular treatment. But one can experience that treatment without feeling compelled to regard one’s disability or minority status as part of one’s individual identity in the practical sense of being a description under which one values oneself. Often, having a disability identity ascribed to one, like having a racial identity ascribed, consists in part in being the object of, and provides an excuse for, discriminatory, demeaning or degrading treatment of various sorts. This is so both for people whose impairments are immediately observable and for those whose impairments are hidden but subject to exposure and ridicule by a temporary change in appearance, e.g., a person with epilepsy who has a seizure in public (Schneider and Conrad 1985; more generally, Davis 2005). And since this social identity is often part of one’s individual identity, such treatment is likely to be injurious to the self-respect of the one with this identity, and in that sense constitute an instance of misrecognition. Ironically, the fact of being unfairly stereotyped can itself shape the identities of those who are treated in this way, as Appiah notes, even if initially they did not identify strongly with the group in question.

Desirable change with respect to social identities is possible in at least two ways. First, even if some important aspects of one’s self are not chosen—say, the fact that one has paraplegia or deafness—how central they are to one’s self-conception, how much they matter to one’s interests and plans, is to some extent within one’s voluntary control. On some views, notably Korsgaard’s, reflective endorsement of an identity is a necessary condition of its being normative for the agent, i.e., providing reasons for her. At the same time, the extent to which one’s identifications are voluntary depends on the constraints of the social environment. One cannot simply decide to make one’s disability a less salient feature of one’s biographical identity, at least, especially if one’s disability is not “hidden”. If the identity is ascribed, and emphasized, by the larger society, it may be difficult to reduce its importance in one’s own practical reasoning. But one still has some choice about whether to accept or resist that emphasis.

Second, there can be a change in the valence of the label, as there has been with the term “queer”: what was once a negative label, accompanied by unjust treatment of various sorts, can be transformed into a positive label and championed as a source of self-respect and pride for those who share in the collective identity. John Lawson discusses how special education for disabled children, once seen as a major factor in the creation of a negative, second-class identity, can be transformed into “sites for the positive promotion of disability as a cultural identity” (Lawson 2001: 203–21). Neither sort of change—in identification or valence—can be accomplished without struggle, personal as well as political, but partial success is sometimes achievable.

Even if disability is not and does not have to be a central component of every disabled person’s identity, this does not negate the significance of disability as an organizing principle of political action. But when the social and political recognition of disability becomes the objective of political action, as it is in identity politics, it gives rise to the “dilemma of difference” (Minow 1990). Consider special education for children: On the one hand, labeling a child “disabled” risks stigmatizing and isolating the child. In this sense, to be “different” is to be inferior. Alternatively, being labeled “disabled” is a way for parents to secure attention to the child’s particular ways of learning and functioning. In this sense, to be “different” is to be entitled to appropriate educational assistance.

The dilemma may not be insurmountable. The movement for universal design in education aims to refashion classrooms and teaching practices to encourage the participation of all students. To the extent that the movement is successful, it will minimize the need for “special education” (Biklen 1992; Gartner and Lipsky 2002; Lipsky and Gartner 1996). Law and public policy must think creatively about ways to solve this dilemma so that the stigma they seek to eliminate is not in effect reinforced. Success in resolving the dilemma of difference may reduce the importance of disability identity for justice. If disability is simply a characteristic to be taken account of in social arrangements, it could become as significant or insignificant as height or aptitude.

There are at least two other risks for an identity politics of disability. One involves the danger of assuming that the members of a particular marginalized group all share the same culture, be it African-American culture or disability culture. This assumption is not required by a mature identity politics, but it may be encouraged by efforts to mobilize diverse individuals around a single identity. Two considerations may help to resist this tendency. First, we must recognize that culture is a complex concept, and that defining it is no easy task. Second, we must recognize that on any plausible definition, people with the same disability (let alone different disabilities) need not share a common culture. There are some examples of a shared disability culture: Deaf culture is perhaps the best known. But many people who are deaf, particularly those who do not sign, do not identify as Deaf or take part in Deaf culture (Tucker 1997 [ 10 ] And even for those who participate, Deaf culture does not appear to be the kind of “encompassing” or “comprehensive” culture claimed by Kymlicka, Margalit, and Raz to provide a “context of choice” for its members. [ 11 ]

The second, related risk involves privileging one identity over others. This is especially important for people with multiple or “intersectional” identities. People who are African-American and disabled, or female and disabled, or disabled and LGBT may sometimes feel a conflict between those identities. In one study, for example, African-American women with mobility impairments reported that they felt estranged from the disability-rights movement, partly because its leadership seemed predominantly white, and partly because some of its principal goals—to maximize independence—went against their more communal values, which emphasized family and co-dependence (Feldman and Tegart 2003). More generally, although there has been comparatively little discussion of the intersection between disability and race within philosophical work on disability (though see Stubblefield 2009), more discussion can be found in disability studies more generally (e.g., Bell 2011). Also, some have noted that mainstream feminism’s focus on independence and self-sufficiency has tended to exclude women with disabilities, who are perceived as lacking in these cardinal virtues (Crawford and Ostrove 2003; Wendell 1996). At the same time, disabled women are often particularly vulnerable to the injustices that motivate the feminist movement: they are frequently victims of sexual exploitation (Crawford and Ostrove 2003), encounter many obstacles to leaving dissatisfying relationships because of physical, psychological and financial dependency (Olkin 2003), and have median incomes below the poverty line and substantially lower than those of their male counterparts (Crawford and Ostrove 2003; Olkin 1999).

In addition to these potential risks associated with emphasizing identity politics for persons with disabilities and other stigmatized minorities, there have been several major challenges in mobilizing people with disabilities around an affirmative group or cultural identity. The first, addressed by the disability rights movement, was getting people with disabilities to recognize that they have something in common with others who are differently impaired but also suffer stigma and exclusion because of their impairment. This has been difficult because people who are born with disabilities or acquire them in childhood come from widely dispersed socioeconomic, geographic and racial groups (Scotch 1988) and so are less likely to grow up with a sense of group identity. Another obstacle has been the overwhelmingly negative connotation of the label “disabled”. Indeed, the challenge for people with visual, motor, and psychiatric impairments has been to recognize that they share a “disabled” identity while denying that this makes them dependent, child-like, or powerless (Asch 1985; Scotch 1988); such a self-identity would quite literally disable one’s capacity for social participation and political action.

It is instructive to compare how the medical and social models would address these challenges. The medical model suggests a disability identity that is both fragmented and negative. Because the medical model defines disability in terms of particular physical or mental impairments, the primary commonalities it recognizes among disabled people are strictly functional; it views the blind person and the deaf person as having very different problems. Although it could recognize the fact that such biomedically distinct conditions had similar social consequences—stigmatization and exclusion—it would treat those similar consequences merely as secondary effects of the two conditions. Even within a single impairment, a medical model encourages distinctions based on etiology. For example, it would distinguish blindness due to Leber’s congenital amaurosis from blindness due to retinaopathy of prematurity, focusing on genetic testing for the former and treatment for the latter, and placing less emphasis on the shared challenges of living with blindness. Although this narrow focus may be appropriate for the purposes of clinical intervention, it obscures the recognition of disability as a social and political problem, except insofar as it raises perennial questions about how to distribute scarce health-care resources (Barnartt et al. 2001).

In contrast, the various social models were explicitly formulated to support a disability identity that could serve as the basis for claims of respect and recognition. The inclusion of people with a vast array of different impairments in United States and other national civil rights laws, and the creation of the United Nations convention on the rights of persons with disabilities, have helped to forge a shared disability identity. The emergence of disability studies as a recognized field of academic inquiry has also contributed. The minority group model promotes a trans-impairment identity by treating people with disabilities as a “discrete and insular minority” making claims on a generally stigmatizing able-bodied majority. Though the minority group model has proven extremely useful in passing anti-discrimination laws, it may do so at the expense of emphasizing the differences between people with disabilities and people without them, rather than highlighting the many ways in which identity need not be tied to the presence or absence of an impairment. The human variation model tempers this emphasis, and resists essentialism about disability identity, by treating the group itself as socially constructed. It sees the category of “the disabled” as resting on an artificial dichotomy imposed on a continuum of variation. The conceptualization of disability as just one source of difference, and as a difference in kind more than degree, can undercut a sense of disability as the basis for a unique and exclusive identity.

The more the redesign of the physical and social environment is guided by a thoroughgoing human-variation model, the less dominant disability identity and identity politics may become for people with disabilities. A society in which disabilities lack the social and practical significance they currently have may be one in which the equality of people with disabilities can be fully recognized without having to treat disability as a salient feature of their identities.

It may be, though, that the physical, sensory, or psychic experience of a particular impairment turns out to be central and salient to how those with the impairment live—even in a society deeply committed to inclusion, participation, and non-discrimination. Perhaps communicating primarily gesturally and not vocally, or moving through the world with wheels and not on legs, or focusing on detail rather than context, makes the lives of people who are deaf, or paralyzed, or autistic sufficiently distinctive that they feel a strong affinity and connection with others who have the same impairment (see SEP entry on disability: definitions, models, experience for a discussion of this claim.) Disability theorists who adopt different social model approaches might profitably consider how different views about group and individual identity apply to people with disabilities.

The connection between different models of disability and different ways of understanding disability identity points us in the direction of an important category of injustice, in addition to the distributive and relational conceptions already discussed. This is epistemic injustice (Fricker 2007; Barnes, 2016). Epistemic injustice consists in a person’s being wronged in her capacity as an epistemic subject. Testimonial injustice consists in someone’s being wronged in her capacity as a subject of knowledge, while hermeneutical injustice consists in someone’s being wronged in her capacity as a subject of understanding. More specifically, testimonial injustice consists in someone’s testimony being given less credence than the evidence warrants due to prejudice on the part of the hearer, while hermeneutical injustice consists in someone’s experiences being obscured from individual and collective understanding due to wrongful exclusion from the practices by which those understandings are generated. Both have clear implications for disability, justice, and identity.

For example, consider the use of quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) to assess the prospective benefits of health care interventions. The standard method of “quality adjustment” involves (i) assigning a value of 1 to each life-year one can reasonably expect to save through a given intervention, and (ii) discounting each life-year that would be lived by a person with a disability by some coefficient (between 0 and 1) which is thought to reflect the badness of living with the disability in question. These coefficients are typically arrived at by asking people how many years of life with the disability people would be willing to exchange for each year of life without the disability. For example, suppose survey data indicate that people would trade 8 years of life with blindness for 4 years of life with sight. The method of quality-adjustment would assign a QALY of 0.5 to each year of life lived with blindness. The upshot is that saving nondisabled life-years provides more “bang for your buck” in the QALY model, and as such is to be preferred to saving disabled life-years.

This implication has led some to criticize the method of quality-adjustment on the grounds that it produces a kind of “double jeopardy:” people with disabilities are disadvantaged twice-over, first by having the disability itself, second by having their health care needs discounted for that very reason (e.g., Singer et al. 1995; Bognar 2011; John et al. 2017). But there is another way of thinking about QALYs which takes issue with both quality-adjustment and an assumption behind the double-jeopardy criticism. When the “exchange rate” between disabled and non-disabled life-years is calculated, it is primarily or exclusively based the judgments of able-bodied people. This feature is criticizable on two distinct grounds. One is that it disrespects the first-person authority of people with disabilities, who know first-hand what it’s like to have the disability in question (and, if disabled as adults, know also what it’s like not to have the disability). This disrespect for first-person authority is plausibly an example of testimonial injustice, at least insofar as it reflects prejudicial or otherwise biased attitudes on the part of the able-bodied. A second, related criticism is that this approach exaggerates the difference in quality between able-bodied and disabled lives, relative to an approach that appropriately incorporated and weighed the perspectives of people with disabilities. Able-bodied people often overestimate how bad it would be to have a given disability, given popular stereotypes which depict life with disability as tragic, occlusive of life’s major goods, and so on. This is plausibly an example of hermeneutical injustice, insofar as the poor understanding of disabled people’s experiences and identities results from their exclusion from the public sphere. This is only one example; much work remains to be done exploring the implications of epistemic injustice for people with disabilities.

This entry began by pointing out a feature of disability that distinguishes it from other characteristics which have often been seen as grounding legitimate claims of justice, such as race, sex, sexual and gender identity, and religion. Simply put, achieving full inclusion for people with disabilities is expensive to a degree that achieving full inclusion for other minorities is not. Any plausible theory of inclusion implies the necessity of considerable accommodation and environmental reconstruction. And even if the costs of such measures have often been exaggerated, it is difficult to see how the appropriate degree of accommodation and reconstruction would not require diverting significant amounts of resources from other worthy goals, including some goals which are supported by countervailing considerations of justice. One implication of this feature of disability is that disability requires us to directly compare, and perhaps trade off, values of relational justice, which ground the demand for full inclusion as part of a society of equals, and values of distributive justice, which ground the demand for a fair distribution of scarce resources.

Having made this general point, the entry proceeded to discuss different models of disability, which differ principally in their understanding of the relationship between impairment and limitation. Whereas the medical model of disability tends to attribute most of the limitations associated with disability to functional aspects of the relevant impairments, the social model of disability emphasizes the mediating role of the social environment—broadly understood to include the configuration of physical space, the availability of various forms of accommodation, social practices and norms, etc.—in generating disability-related disadvantage. Among other things, the social model highlights the relational aspects of disability-related disadvantage, such as stigma, invisibility, and exclusion, whereas the medical model lends itself to a narrow distributive interpretation of the claims of justice generated by disability.

In subsequent sections, the entry focused on the role of disability in contractualist and other distributive theories of justice. Disability has often been regarded as a “limit case” for contractualist theories of justice, and more specifically for the idealizing assumptions these theories make about the capacities of those who choose and those who are governed by contractualist principles of justice. We also saw that disability has played a central role in discussions of outcome-oriented, distributive theories of justice, in particular luck egalitarianism. Internally, disability has played a central role in discussions about the “currency” of justice, since it has often been seen as a paradigm example of unchosen disadvantage. Externally, disability has played a central role in relational criticisms of luck egalitarian theories of justice. At best, these theories have been seen as failing to attribute normative significance to morally relevant differences between identical patterns of distribution which differ in the causal contribution of the social environment. At worst, these theories have been criticized for expressing disrespect towards people with disabilities in virtue of characterizing them as “mere” unfortunates or objects of pity. Although some of these criticisms may be overstated, they have been taken to heart by many theorists of distributive justice, especially proponents of the capabilities approach. Finally, the entry concluded by pointing to a topic which has received far less attention in discussions of disability and justice: namely, the normative significance of disability as a form of social identity, and the connections between disability and epistemic injustice.

This entry raises a number of questions which would benefit from further exploration. Clearly, one general question is how exactly to understand the distinction between distributive and relational values of justice. Another, related question is how to assess the comparative weight or importance of these values. And if, as many find plausible, some form of pluralism about justice is the correct answer, then we will need to work out how the relevant trade-offs, weights, and so on apply to the special case of disability, which simultaneously raises both distributive and relational concerns. A third question which calls for further research is the link between disability and epistemic injustice. We briefly discussed two examples of testimonial and hermeneutical injustice concerning people with disabilities, but there are—needless to say—many more. Indeed, disability may be an especially powerful example of epistemic injustice precisely because the phenomenological experiences of people with disabilities, especially those with sensory impairments, differ considerably from the experiences of the able-bodied majority, raising the hard question of how well we must understand others in order to treat them as justice requires.

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cognitive disability and moral status | contractarianism | disability: definitions and models | feminist philosophy, topics: perspectives on disability | identity: over time | identity politics | justice: distributive | luck: justice and bad luck | Rawls, John | recognition | redistribution

Acknowledgments

We want to thank the participants in the Workshop on Disability: Bioethics, Philosophy, and Public Policy (January 18–19, 2007) for enormous help in framing the issues discussed in this Entry. In addition, we have received invaluable editorial assistance from Dorit Barlevy, Ari Schick and William Chin.

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Library of Congress Catalog Data: ISSN 1095-5054

The Psychology of Peace Promotion pp 219–235 Cite as

Social Justice and Peace

• Linda M. Woolf 4  
• First Online: 05 July 2019

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Part of the book series: Peace Psychology Book Series ((PPBS))

Social injustice and systematic violations of human rights create cultures of violence and harm. This chapter explores the relationship between elements of social justice (e.g., distributive justice, procedural justice, and equity), human rights, and various elements of peace processes (e.g., negative-positive peace; peacekeeping to peacebuilding), which can be used to advocate and foster cultures of peace. The influence of globalization on the burgeoning child sex tourism trade provides a case study to examining the interplay between human rights, social injustice, and direct, structural, and cultural forms of violence.

• Social justice
• Distributive justice
• Procedural justice
• Peacebuilding
• Structural violence
• Direct violence
• Child sex tourism
• Trafficking
• Globalization

Linda M. Woolf is Professor of Peace Psychology and International Human Rights at Webster University.

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Woolf, L.M. (2019). Social Justice and Peace. In: Njoku, M.G.C., Jason, L.A., Johnson, R.B. (eds) The Psychology of Peace Promotion. Peace Psychology Book Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14943-7_14

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Definition of injustice – Learner’s Dictionary

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(Definition of injustice from the Cambridge Learner's Dictionary © Cambridge University Press)

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Definition of injustice noun from the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary

• We are committed to fighting against poverty and injustice.
• a burning sense of injustice
• Social and political injustice seemed to be getting worse rather than better.
• She was enraged at the injustice of the remark.
• The report exposes the injustices of the system.
• It would be an injustice to the man to imprison him for life.
• She remains adamant that an injustice was done.
• She was acclaimed for speaking out against injustice.
• She was overwhelmed by the injustice of it all.
• The trial was regarded as the greatest injustice of the post-war criminal justice system.
• They see the injustice and want to help.
• a novel that sets out to expose social injustice
• a terrible injustice by the police
• people who work hard to correct society's injustices
• I did not really see myself as a victim of injustice.
• She felt a burning sense of injustice with regard to the situation.
• The court decided that he certainly had suffered an injustice.
• They were convinced that a grave injustice had been done.
• regard something as
• injustice by
• injustice to
• the injustice of it all
• a sense of injustice
• a victim of injustice

Questions about grammar and vocabulary?

Find the answers with Practical English Usage online, your indispensable guide to problems in English.

• We may have been doing him an injustice. This work is good.
• Perhaps I'm doing you an injustice.

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Guest Essay

I’m an Economist. Don’t Worry. Be Happy.

By Justin Wolfers

Dr. Wolfers is a professor of economics and public policy at the University of Michigan and a host of the “Think Like an Economist” podcast.

I, too, know that flash of resentment when grocery store prices feel as if they don’t make sense. I hate the fact that a small treat feels less like an earned indulgence and more like financial folly. And I’m concerned about my kids now that house prices look like telephone numbers.

But I breathe through it. And I remind myself of the useful perspective that my training as an economist should bring. Sometimes it helps, so I want to share it with you.

Simple economic logic suggests that neither your well-being nor mine depends on the absolute magnitude of the numbers on a price sticker.

To see this, imagine falling asleep and waking up years later to discover that every price tag has an extra zero on it. A gumball costs $2.50 instead of a quarter; the dollar store is the $10 store; and a coffee is $50. The $10 bill in your wallet is now $100; and your bank statement has transformed $800 of savings into $8,000.

Importantly, the price that matters most to you — your hourly pay rate — is also 10 times as high.

What has actually changed in this new world of inflated price tags? The world has a lot more zeros in it, but nothing has really changed.

That’s because the currency that really matters is how many hours you have to work to afford your groceries, a small treat or a home, and none of these real trade-offs have changed.

This fairy tale — with some poetic license — is roughly the story of our recent inflation. The pandemic-fueled inflationary impulse didn’t add an extra zero to every price tag, but it did something similar.

The same inflationary forces that pushed these prices higher have also pushed wages to be 22 percent higher than on the eve of the pandemic. Official statistics show that the stuff that a typical American buys now costs 20 percent more over the same period. Some prices rose a little more, some a little less, but they all roughly rose in parallel.

It follows that the typical worker can now afford 2 percent more stuff. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but it’s a faster rate of improvement than the average rate of real wage growth over the past few decades .

Of course, those are population averages, and they may not reflect your reality. Some folks really are struggling. But in my experience, many folks feel that they’re falling behind, even when a careful analysis of the numbers suggests they’re not.

That’s because real people — and yes, even professional economists — tend to process the parallel rise of prices and wages in quite different ways. In brief, researchers have found that we tend to internalize the gains caused by inflation and externalize the losses. Those different processes yield different emotional responses.

Let’s start with higher prices. Sticker shock hurts. Even as someone who closely studies the inflation statistics, I’m still often surprised by higher prices. They feel unfair. They undermine my spending power, and my sense of control and order.

But in reality, higher prices are only the first act of the inflationary play. It’s a play that economists have seen before. In episode after episode, surges in prices have led to — or been preceded by — a proportional surge in wages.

Even though wages tend to rise hand in hand with prices, we tell ourselves a different story, in which the wage increases we get have nothing to do with price increases that cause them.

I know that when I ripped open my annual review letter and learned that I had gotten a larger raise than normal, it felt good. For a moment, I believed that my boss had really seen me and finally valued my contribution.

But then my economist brain took over, and slowly it sunk in that my raise wasn’t a reward for hard work, but rather a cost-of-living adjustment.

Internalizing the gain and externalizing the cost of inflation protects you from this deflating realization. But it also distorts your sense of reality.

The reason so many Americans feel that inflation is stealing their purchasing power is that they give themselves unearned credit for the offsetting wage increases that actually restore it.

Those who remember the Great Inflation of the ’60s, ’70s and early ’80s have lived through many cycles of prices rising and wages following. They understand the deal: Inflation makes life more difficult for a bit, but you’re only ever one cost-of-living adjustment away from catching up.

But younger folks — anyone under 60 — never experienced sustained inflation rates greater than 5 percent in their adult lives. And I think this explains why they’re so angry about today’s inflation.

They haven’t seen this play before, and so they don’t know that when Act I involves higher prices, Act II usually sees wages rising to catch up. If you didn’t know there was an Act II coming, you might leave the theater at intermission thinking you just saw a show about big corporations exploiting a pandemic to take your slice of the economic pie.

By this telling, decades of low inflation have left several generations ill equipped to deal with its return.

While older Americans understand that the pain of inflation is transitory, younger folks aren’t so sure. Inflation is a lot scarier when you fear that today’s price rises will permanently undermine your ability to make ends meet.

Perhaps this explains why the recent moderate burst of inflation has created seemingly more anxiety than previous inflationary episodes.

More generally, being an economist makes me an optimist. Social media is awash with (false) claims that we’re in a “ silent depression ,” and those who want to make America great again are certain it was once so much better.

But in reality, our economy this year is larger, more productive and will yield higher average incomes than in any prior year on record in American history. And because the United States is the world’s richest major economy, we can now say that we are almost certainly part of the richest large society in its richest year in the history of humanity.

The income of the average American will double approximately every 39 years. And so when my kids are my age, average income will be roughly double what it is today. Far from being fearful for my kids, I’m envious of the extraordinary riches their generation will enjoy.

Psychologists describe anxiety disorders as occurring when the panic you feel is out of proportion to the danger you face. By this definition, we’re in the midst of a macroeconomic anxiety attack.

And so the advice I give as an economist mirrors what I would give were I your therapist: Breathe through that anxiety, and remember that this, too, shall pass.

Justin Wolfers is a professor of economics and public policy at the University of Michigan and a host of the “Think Like an Economist” podcast.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook , Instagram , TikTok , WhatsApp , X and Threads .

What is the difference between a solar eclipse and a lunar eclipse?

It almost time! Millions of Americans across the country Monday are preparing to witness the once-in-a-lifetime total solar eclipse as it passes over portions of Mexico, the United States and Canada.

It's a sight to behold and people have now long been eagerly awaiting what will be their only chance until 2044 to witness totality, whereby the moon will completely block the sun's disc, ushering in uncharacteristic darkness.

That being said, many are curious on what makes the solar eclipse special and how is it different from a lunar eclipse.

The total solar eclipse is today: Get the latest forecast and everything you need to know

What is an eclipse?

An eclipse occurs when any celestial object like a moon or a planet passes between two other bodies, obscuring the view of objects like the sun, according to NASA .

What is a solar eclipse?

A total solar eclipse occurs when the moon comes in between the Earth and the sun, blocking its light from reaching our planet, leading to a period of darkness lasting several minutes. The resulting "totality," whereby observers can see the outermost layer of the sun's atmosphere, known as the corona, presents a spectacular sight for viewers and confuses animals – causing nocturnal creatures to stir and bird and insects to fall silent.

Partial eclipses, when some part of the sun remains visible, are the most common, making total eclipses a rare sight.

What is a lunar eclipse?

A total lunar eclipse occurs when the moon and the sun are on exact opposite sides of Earth. When this happens, Earth blocks the sunlight that normally reaches the moon. Instead of that sunlight hitting the moon’s surface, Earth's shadow falls on it.

Lunar eclipses are often also referred to the "blood moon" because when the Earth's shadow covers the moon, it often produces a red color. The coloration happens because a bit of reddish sunlight still reaches the moon's surface, even though it's in Earth's shadow.

Difference between lunar eclipse and solar eclipse

The major difference between the two eclipses is in the positioning of the sun, the moon and the Earth and the longevity of the phenomenon, according to NASA.

A lunar eclipse can last for a few hours, while a solar eclipse lasts only a few minutes. Solar eclipses also rarely occur, while lunar eclipses are comparatively more frequent. While at least two partial lunar eclipses happen every year, total lunar eclipses are still rare, says NASA.

Another major difference between the two is that for lunar eclipses, no special glasses or gizmos are needed to view the spectacle and one can directly stare at the moon. However, for solar eclipses, it is pertinent to wear proper viewing glasses and take the necessary safety precautions because the powerful rays of the sun can burn and damage your retinas.

Contributing: Eric Lagatta, Doyle Rice, USA TODAY