Justice

Eight steps to the hardest question in the city: when liberty and equality collide over who gets what, what does justice require?

A course on the thought of Political Philosophy.

Course outline

  1. The Question of Social Justice — What justice in distribution requires when liberty and equality collide — and the three rival answers the rest of the course will test: reward by desert, relief by need, or shares by equality, with…
  2. Desert: Justice as Proportion to Merit — The oldest answer: Aristotle's distributive justice as geometric proportion — equals treated equally, unequals unequally, shares tracking merit — and the quarrel built into it from the start over…
  3. Property: The Labour Theory and What We Own — Locke's answer: we own ourselves and our labour, and by mixing labour with the unowned world we make it our property — bounded by the provisos of spoilage and "enough and as good," until money…
  4. Exploitation: The Labour That Is Taken — Marx's indictment: under the wage system the worker creates more value than the wage returns, and the surplus is taken by the owner of capital — so the real injustice is not unequal shares but the…
  5. Justice as Fairness: The Modern Landmark — Rawls's own theory: choose the principles of justice from behind a veil of ignorance, not knowing who you will be, and reason will pick equal liberties, fair opportunity, and the difference principle…
  6. Luck and Choice: Did Rawls Go Far Enough? — Dworkin's refinement: a just distribution should be endowment-insensitive but ambition-sensitive — neutralizing the brute luck of birth and talent while holding people responsible for their own…
  7. The Objection from the Right — Nozick's libertarian reply: justice is historical, not patterned — a distribution is just if it arose by just steps, whatever its shape. The difference principle is a pattern, and liberty upsets…
  8. The Objection from the Left, and the Verdict — Cohen's egalitarian critique: the difference principle still lets the talented hold society to ransom — demanding incentive pay to do work they could do anyway — so justice needs not only just…

Part of the Symposium course library.