Theories of Justice: Rawls, Nozick, and the Great Debates

Overview

Theories of justice are the systematic attempts to answer the question that lies at the heart of political philosophy: what does a just society look like? Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as John Rawls famously declared, and the various theories of justice represent competing visions of the principles that should govern the basic structure of society. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes that the question of justice is distinct from the question of charity or benevolence: justice concerns what is owed or due, the claims that individuals can make on one another and on the institutions that govern their common life.

The major theories of justice can be organized around their answers to three fundamental questions. First, what is the metric of justice: what should be distributed? Is it income, wealth, opportunities, capabilities, or something else? Second, what is the principle of distribution: how should goods be allocated? Should they be distributed equally, according to need, according to desert, according to free exchange, or according to some other principle? Third, what is the scope of justice: who are the subjects of justice? Does justice apply only within a single political community, or does it extend to all human beings regardless of nationality?

Justice as Fairness: John Rawls

John Rawls's A Theory of Justice (1971) is the most influential work of political philosophy of the twentieth century. Rawls argued that the principles of justice are those that would be chosen by rational parties in an "original position" behind a "veil of ignorance" — a device that deprives the parties of knowledge of their particular characteristics, including their class, race, gender, talents, and conception of the good. The idea is that the principles chosen under these conditions will be fair, because no one can tailor them to their own advantage.

Rawls argued that the parties in the original position would choose two principles. The first principle guarantees equal basic liberties for all citizens: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, the right to vote, freedom of association, and the rule of law. The second principle has two parts: fair equality of opportunity (offices and positions must be open to all under conditions of fair opportunity) and the difference principle (social and economic inequalities are permitted only if they benefit the least advantaged members of society). The difference principle is Rawls's most distinctive and controversial contribution. It allows inequality as an incentive for productivity, but only when the inequality works to the advantage of those who are worst off.

The Stanford Encyclopedia notes that Rawls's theory has been criticized from every direction. Libertarians argue that the difference principle violates individual rights by requiring redistribution. Communitarians argue that the original position abstracts away from the social attachments and identities that make us who we are. Feminists argue that the theory ignores the structure of the family and the distribution of care. And egalitarians argue that Rawls does not go far enough, that the difference principle permits too much inequality. But whether they agree or disagree, virtually all contemporary philosophers of justice work within the framework Rawls established.

The Entitlement Theory: Robert Nozick

Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) is the most powerful libertarian theory of justice. Nozick argued that justice is historical, not patterned: a distribution of holdings is just if it arises from just acquisition (acquiring unowned resources in a legitimate way) and just transfer (exchanging holdings through voluntary transactions). Any distribution that arises through these processes is just, regardless of its overall pattern. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes that Nozick's entitlement theory is a direct challenge to Rawls's difference principle and to all patterned theories of justice.

Nozick supported his argument with the famous "Wilt Chamberlain" example. Suppose a society begins with a perfectly equal distribution of income. A basketball player, Wilt Chamberlain, signs a contract with a team: he will play for a small fee from each ticket sold. Over the course of a season, millions of people freely choose to pay a dollar to watch him play. At the end of the season, Chamberlain has a much larger income than the average person. The distribution is now unequal, but it arose from voluntary transactions. Nozick argues that to maintain the original pattern of equality, the state would have to interfere with the freedom of individuals to exchange their holdings as they see fit. The conclusion: liberty upsets patterns, and the attempt to maintain a pattern requires the violation of liberty.

The entitlement theory has been criticized on several grounds. The principle of just acquisition, which Nozick adapts from Locke's theory of property, is notoriously difficult to specify: what counts as "mixing one's labor" with an unowned resource, and what does it mean to leave "enough and as good" for others? The principle of just transfer ignores the background conditions under which transactions occur: if the initial distribution of resources is unjust, then even voluntary exchanges may perpetuate injustice. And the theory's insistence on the priority of liberty over equality has been challenged by those who argue that the value of liberty is itself conditional on the satisfaction of basic needs.

Utilitarian Justice

The utilitarian theory of justice holds that an action or institution is just if it maximizes overall well-being or happiness. The classical utilitarians — Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and Henry Sidgwick — argued that the principle of utility provides a complete standard for evaluating institutions and actions, including those that we call just or unjust. For the utilitarian, justice is a name for those requirements of utility that are so important that they are enforced by the state and supported by the strongest moral sentiments.

Mill's Utilitarianism (1861) includes a chapter on justice that is still widely studied. Mill argued that the sentiment of justice arises from the natural human desire to retaliate against injuries, and that this sentiment is given moral content by the principle of utility. Justice is "a name for certain classes of moral rules which concern the essentials of human well-being." The rules of justice — those that protect life, liberty, and property, and that enforce promises and contracts — are the most important of all moral rules, because they protect the conditions of social life itself.

The utilitarian theory of justice has been criticized for permitting the sacrifice of the rights and interests of individuals for the sake of the greater good. The objection is that utilitarianism does not take the separateness of persons seriously: it treats individuals as mere receptacles of utility, and it is willing to harm some if enough others benefit. Rawls's theory of justice as fairness was developed partly as a response to this weakness of utilitarianism.

Egalitarian Justice

The egalitarian tradition argues that justice requires equality of some kind. The simplest version is strict equality of outcomes: everyone should have the same amount of income and wealth. But few egalitarians defend this position, because they recognize that equal outcomes would require constant redistribution and would ignore the fact that people have different preferences and make different choices.

The most influential contemporary version of egalitarianism is luck egalitarianism, which holds that inequalities are unjust if they result from factors beyond a person's control — what is sometimes called "brute luck" — but are acceptable if they result from the person's own choices. The idea is that the distribution of natural talents, social circumstances, and family background is morally arbitrary, and that the inequalities that flow from these arbitrary factors should be corrected. The challenge for luck egalitarianism is to distinguish genuine choice from circumstance, and to determine what level of inequality is compatible with the equal moral status of all persons.

The Capability Approach

The capability approach, developed by the economist and philosopher Amartya Sen and the philosopher Martha Nussbaum, shifts the focus of justice from the distribution of goods to the distribution of the capabilities to live a flourishing life. Sen argued that the question of justice is not what people have but what they are able to do and be — what he called their "capabilities" to function. Two people may have the same income, but one may be healthy and able-bodied while the other is disabled or chronically ill. The first has a greater capability to convert her income into a good life. The capability approach focuses on the actual opportunities people have to achieve the things they value.

Nussbaum developed a more specific version of the capability approach, with a list of "central capabilities" that she argues are necessary conditions of a dignified human life. These include life, bodily health, bodily integrity, senses imagination and thought, emotions, practical reason, affiliation, other species, play, and control over one's environment. Nussbaum argues that a just society must guarantee these capabilities to all citizens above a minimum threshold.

The capability approach has been criticized for being too vague about how to weigh different capabilities, for being too individualistic, and for not providing determinate guidance about the distribution of resources. But it has been enormously influential in development economics, human rights theory, and debates about global justice.

Conclusion

Theories of justice are not merely academic exercises. Every policy debate about taxation, welfare, healthcare, education, and the structure of the economy is a debate about justice. The theories surveyed here — Rawls's justice as fairness, Nozick's entitlement theory, utilitarian justice, egalitarian justice, and the capability approach — represent the most powerful attempts to articulate the principles that should govern the basic structure of society. The debate between them is not likely to be settled soon, and the Stanford Encyclopedia observes that the philosophy of justice is more vibrant and contested today than at any time in the past half century. What matters is not which theory one ultimately accepts, but that one engages with the arguments and recognizes that the question of justice is the question of what we owe to one another — and that question admits of no easy answers.