Justice in American Thought

During the 1980s, the American conception of justice revolved around the conflicting arguments of liberalism and communitarianism. The ensuing debates had at their core the role of visions of the human good and the question of how the individual's identity is formed, and not issues of distributive justice. Michael Walzer, Michael Sandel, and Alasdair MacIntyre stood out as thinkers who challenged the Rawlsian view and its design of a situation in which selves who are bereft of any contingent traits are expected to arrive at a universally binding agreement on justice. On this issue, the communitarian side won the day. Rawls admitted that the parties to the original position are representatives of democratic citizens, thus introducing a substantial element of contingency into his assumptions. On the further issue of the need of shared values to sustain a just order, the communitarian standpoint also prevailed. Rawlsian justice obtains guidance and derives its principles from the common values that distinguish the constitutional democracy of the United States.

But for all its insistence on how conceptions of the human good ought to guide visions of justice, communitarianism did not muster enough theoretical resources to deal with the fact that, in contemporary societies, multiple and opposing views of the human good are fated either to accept one another or to compete for supremacy via state power. This is not to say that the different versions of political liberalism articulated, among others, by John Rawls and Charles Larmore, fared better. In Rawls's and Larmore's theories, the agreement on principles of justice has an important rider. The agreement is only concerned with people who may hold reasonable conceptions of the human good. And a reasonable conception is one that accepts the principles of justice. Communitarianism excludes conceptions of the human good at variance with the dominant views of a particular society, and contemporary liberalism excludes comprehensive doctrines that justice has not certified as reasonable. Yet, the liberal argument that, in a context ridden by conflictive ideas, an agreement on principles of justice is more feasible than one on a conception of the human good, remains unassailable.

The end result is circularity, which according to Richard Rorty is the most that can be expected in a world devoid of ultimate foundations. Individuals ought to justify their principles, Rorty argues, not by invoking a transcendental realm or a universal or true morality, but by referring to those principles and institutions that have proven, so far, to provide stability and respect for people. A conception of justice should be described by making reference to its outcomes, and these outcomes ought to be described by referring back to the principles of justice.

Michael Walzer was the only philosopher who put forward a communitarian version of justice. Walzer's theory distances itself from the Rawlsian paradigm by positing a diversity of social goods that obtain their meaning from their society and inhabit different social spheres. These spheres are not meant to cross their boundaries. The sphere of need is not the sphere of desert and, accordingly, they should not be judged according to a single criterion. Similarly, a social good in one sphere should not carry any import in another or, in Walzer's words, should not be "convertible." Wealth in the economic sphere should not be translated into more political power or access to better health care. He calls his theory "complex equality" as a contradistinction to "simple equality," which is the term he uses to describe Rawlsian justice. In simple equality, the state needs to intervene frequently to curtail any hindrances that may undermine the difference principle. In complex equality, "the autonomy of distributive spheres" is vindicated, and individuals, not the state, would have "local monopolies," but social conflicts would be diffused across the social and political spectrum. Local monopolies refer to the goods some people may control. Physicians, through their education, experience, and talents, control their areas of expertise. But it does not follow that this monopoly entails power to determine people's needs. These needs ought to be defined by the community. "Equality," Walzer writes, "is a complex relation of persons, mediated by the goods we make, share, and divide among ourselves; it is not an identity of possessions. It requires then, a diversity of distributive criteria that mirrors the diversity of social goods" (p. 18). The demarcation of the spheres of justice will depend on the dominant morality of a particular society. While Rawls argues that his arguments belong in the realm of ideal theory, Walzer goes into historical examples to buttress his theoretical reflections.