Learning Objectives – On completing this chapter, you will be able to:
Learning Objectives – On completing this chapter, you will be able to:
- Summarize Plato’s theory of justice from the Republic.
- Discuss and evaluate the classical liberal position as expressed in John Locke’s concept of the “state of nature” and the social contract and Robert Nozicks concept of justice as entitlement.
- Summarize the “logic of the commons” and explain how this concept applies to the classical liberal concept of social justice,
- Explain the two principles of John Rawls’ theory of justice as fairness and discuss sample applications to illustrate the practical relevance of these principles.
- Discuss and evaluate Rawls’ use of the concepts of “original position” and “veil of ignorance” to justify the theory of justice as fairness.
Social justice is just the idea of goodness as applied to social groups. When asked what it means for a society to be just, most of us will think of things like freedom and equality. But things haven’t always been thus. Valuing liberty and freedom is a pretty recent innovation. We have already noted John Locke as an early advocate of liberal political thinking in the 17th century. Older conceptions of justice were neither egalitarian nor freedom loving. Here we’ll consider Plato’s view of the concept.
Plato’s Theory of Justice
Plato develops his conception of justice in the Republic. Here Plato develops a view of the ideal state as modeled on his concept of the ideal person. The state is understood as the person writ large. The idea of justice, for Plato, was as much a virtue of the individual person as of the state. Justice was seen as a kind of meta-virtue. The just person is the person who has all the other virtues and has them in the appropriate integrated balance. People have various capacities and abilities, and we have various virtues that correspond to those abilities. We can be courageous in facing threats, temperate in managing our appetites, diligent in carrying out our projects, and wise in deliberating about what to do and how. To be a just person is for the various abilities relevant to the various virtues to be playing their proper role. When we turn to the justice of communities, we find different individuals playing the various roles. We want the virtue of wisdom in the ruling class, the virtue of courage in the military class, and the virtues of temperance and diligence in the business class. The just community, in Plato’s view, is the community where the various elements stick to their proper roles and cultivate the virtues appropriate to those roles.
Though Athens was a democracy, Plato was no fan of democracy. In his dialogues he has Socrates repeatedly lampooning democracy as rule by the least qualified. Plato admired expertise and excellence. His idea of justice is one where the various functions of society are carried out by those who have the expertise and excellence appropriate to the specific role. While Plato places no particular value on equality or freedom, his ideal state