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Justice in American Thought

Moral Context Of Justice

The last word on the moral context of justice in American thought might belong to William Connolly and Alasdair MacIntyre. Connolly defends an agonistic ethos in which a person's identity, the same identity that the Puritans saw as fixed by God's grace, could recognize its contingent character. In this recognition, Connolly sees a conversation in which cherished assumptions about the individual's character and the United States' foundations would be open to redefinitions and negotiations. MacIntyre did not feel at home in this conversation, which in his view is sequestered by a liberal marketplace of ideas regulated by justice. In his discussion of virtue, he envisages a rather dark horizon for the American intellectual landscape. Current times, he argues, are analogous to the era when the Roman Republic dwindled and finally fell. As in those times, citizens should retreat from the public sphere and move to small communities that may share the same conception of the human good. This, again, is the fragmentation that has been a constitutive element of the American landscape. Rawls himself is not free from the suspicion that his theory, though envisioning a stable interplay between a multiplicity of social unions, is ridden, too, by a fragmented ethos.

Indeed, Rawls's theory treads its way along two paths that are prone to deny one another. There is a strong sense of community to the extent that members of particular groups see their worth as being determined by the appreciation they receive from others. For self-esteem, in Rawls's view, does not depend on the individual's convictions, but on the external approval of his or her peers. This is similar to Winthrop's understanding of love, which is an "apprehension of some resemblance in the things loved to that which affectes it … soe a mother loves her childe, because shee throughly conceives a resemblance of herself in it" (p. 37). As in the Puritan context, the Rawlsian sense of community requires clear delimitations. Since a Rawlsian society may have large inequalities that, through envy, may bring havoc to stability, the plurality of associations comes to the rescue. These associations tend "to reduce the visibility, or at least the painful visibility, of variations in men's prospects.… The various associations in society tend to divide it into so many noncomparing groups, the discrepancies between these divisions not attracting the kind of attention which unsettles the lives of those less well placed" (Rawls 1971, p. 537).

From John Winthrop's message that the rich and the poor ought to accept their place as part of a divine order, to the Federalist recognition of the unavoidability of factions, the anti-federalist advocacy of a fragmented legislature, and John Rawls's call to avoid the "painful visibility" of "variations in men's prospects" by dividing society into "noncomparing groups" that would not intersect in their respective paths, unity and fragmentation stand as consistent strands in the way justice has been woven into the inner fabric of American thought. In this consistency, "justice as fairness" appears as a dim echo of the arguments John Winthrop put forward aboard the Arabella.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Beveridge, Albert J. "In Support of an American Empire." U.S. Senate. 56 Cong. 1 sess., 704–712.

Connolly, William. Identity/Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991.

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Dworkin, Ronald. "What Is Equality? Part 2: Equality of Resources." Philosophy and Public Affairs 10, no. 4 (fall 1981): 283–345.

——. "What Is Equality? Part 3: The Place of Liberty." Iowa Law Review 73, no. 1 (October 1987): 24–50.

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"Letters I, III–IV." In Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and James Jay, The Federalist: With Letters of Brutus, edited by Terence Ball, 453–465. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

"Letters II, V." In The Complete Anti-Federalist: Writings by the Opponents of the Constitution, edited by Herbert J. Storing, selected by Murray Dry, 60–65. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1981.

Locke, John. A Second Treatise of Government. Edited by C. B. Macpherson. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1980.

Lutz, Donald S., ed. Colonial Origins of the American Constitution: A Documentary History. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1998. See especially: "Articles, Laws, and Orders, Divine, Politic, and Martial for the Colony in Virginia. 1610–1611," pp. 314–326;

"Laws Enacted by the First General Assembly of Virginia, August 2–4, 1619," pp. 327–335; "[Agreement Between the Settlers of New Plymouth] (The Mayflower Compact). November 11, 1620," pp. 31–32; "Plymouth Oath of Allegiance and Fidelity (1625)," pp. 33–34; "Pilgrim Code of Law, November 15, 1636," pp. 61–67; "Dedham Covenant. 1636," pp. 68–69.

MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue. 2nd ed. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984.

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Mather, Increase. "A Brief History of the War with the Indians in New England." In So Dreadfull a Judgment: Puritan Responses to King Philip's War, 1676–1677, edited by Richard Slotkin and James K. Folsom, 81–163. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1978.

Rawls, John. Justice as Fairness: A Restatement. Edited by Erin Kelly. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001.

——. Political Liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.

——. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971.

Rorty, Richard. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

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Walzer, Michael. Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality. New York: Basic Books, 1983.

Winthrop, John. "A Modell of Christian Charity." In American Sermons. The Pilgrims to Martin Luther King Jr., 28–43. New York: The Library of America, 1999.

Wood, Gordon S. "Interests and Disinterestedness in the Making of the Constitution." In Beyond Confederation, edited by Richard Beeman, Stephen Botein, and Edward C. Carter II, 69–107. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987.

Young, Iris Marion. Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990.

Roberto Alejandro

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Science EncyclopediaScience & Philosophy: Intuitionist logic to KabbalahJustice in American Thought - Puritan Conceptions Of Justice, Providential View Of Justice, The Individual And The State, John Rawls