Justice: Aristotle, Marx, Rawls

The idea of justice underlies much of political theorizing since Socrates. Justice is generally thought of as defining the right relations between individuals within a given political order. It is usually associated with the concepts of desert and of equality. The problem of justice seems to be the right manner of apportioning society’s goods. Justice is giving one what is due and what is due may be argued to be what one merits or what is given equally to all others. Thus, we have Aristotle asserting that justice is when a citizen is given rights on the basis of his/her contribution to the end of the polis. Karl Marx prescribes that each be allocated the goods of society based on his/her need and from each is work solicited according to his/her ability. John Rawls, meanwhile, maintains that justice is first having extensive equal liberties and second having equal opportunities with the proviso that any inequality should be to the benefit of the disadvantaged. It is obvious from these statements of what justice is that the concept means different things to these three theorists. What is not obvious is that their concepts of justice differ on the bases of different assumptions about the exemplar political order and conceptions of what makes the individual. I argue precisely this, that these statements about justice mean different things, not only because they are uttered in different epochs, but also because they imply different conceptions of the right political order for individual interactions. This only means that justice is defined by how human relations are organized or in these cases, theorized. Justice is a characteristic of a political order that is internally determined by that order. It is not an external and independent concept or category on which basis a certain political order is judged as just or unjust. If a foreign concept of justice is used to judge a certain political community, this justice carries with it the weight of its assumed political order and conceptions of the individual. This judgment based on justice is ultimately a judgment of one political order over another.

In the Ethics, Aristotle conceives of justice as a virtue of the individual and the polis. To individuals, justice is a “state of character” that disposes them to act justly or unjustly. It is “the way we behave in our dealings with other people that makes us just or unjust,”and this way is figuring out the correct action between the extremes of unjust ones. As principal virtue, “just acts give pleasure to a lover of justice;” and as one of the virtues, “justice is a sort of a mean state… because it aims at the mean, whereas injustice aims at the extremes.” This is in accordance to a discussion on proportion and equality that Aristotle makes to sort out the value of particular just acts. Justice is the mean between maximizing an advantage for oneself and minimizing the advantage of the recipient in a particular act. It is also the mean between loss and gain in voluntary and involuntary transactions. Aristotle insists that justice can only occur between individuals and one cannot be unjust to oneself except metaphorically. Aristotle refers here to acts committed against slaves and children who are viewed to be part of the self. Justice, Aristotle claims, is the complete virtue because is both the active exercise of complete virtue in relation to another person and not only to him/herself. In this sense, to be just is to be prudent, “to feel or act towards the right person to the right extent at the right time for the right reason in the right way.”

Aristotle’s assertion that justice occurs only between individuals may be interpreted as a reaction to Plato’s claim that justice also occurs in the proper ordering of an individual soul. What is important though is that such an assertion primarily and effectively places justice within the domain of the political. Aristotle, of course, privileges the political because it is where the full human potential can be cultivated and achieved. Indeed, other virtues as just acts can be exercised in private relations between individuals, such as in economic exchanges between households and in matters of friendship. But the exemplar justice is what “tends to conserve the happiness (and the constituents of happiness) of a political association.” Thus, Aristotle declares that the subject of his inquiry is not only “justice in general but political justice,” and this “obtains between those who share a life for the satisfaction of their needs as persons free and equal, either arithmetically or proportionately.”

In Politics, Aristotle asserts that justice is the political good. As such, it involves two factors: “things, and the persons to whom things are assigned.” The “things” of justice changes in Aristotle’s discussions, at times these are “rights” or plain “good” and at other times these are “offices and honours.” Nevertheless, the question of justice is the question of the proper distribution of the goods of society. The oligarchs and democrats have got justice both right and wrong. In oligarchy, it is claimed that inequality in wealth should also manifest in inequality of rights. In democracy, it is claimed that those equal in birth should have equal rights. Indeed, there is a sense in which inequality is just. There is also a sense in which equality is just. This is because justice is relative to individuals. Thus inequality is just only for those unequal and not for all. And equality is just for those equal. What oligarchs and democrats disagree on is what constitutes equality in the person. In each case, superiority or equality in one aspect of the individual means “superiority or equality all around.” Both sides fail to mention the cardinal factor in the just distribution of things: the end for which the political association exists. To Aristotle, the polis “grows for the sake of mere life […still short of self-sufficiency], [and] it exists for the sake of a good life […therefore fully self-sufficient]. Wealth is necessary as a condition for good life but is not sufficient to achieve it. Free birth makes the person a citizen of the polis and as such eligible for the good life but free birth does not make the good life. The good life, like the individual practice of virtue, is an activity in which the individual as citizen is engaged in together with other citizens. The proper political order provides the opportunity and space for the pursuit of the good life. This may seem a circular argument for the end of the polis. But Aristotle views the good life as means and as end. As means, it is the activity of good living properly pursued in the polis. As an end, the good life is properly pursued through the practice of good living. As an end, it is the polis that generates the practice of good actions. The polis, too, is both means and end. Thus justice, in this primary sense, abides in the distribution contingent on the contribution of the citizen to the good life: “[t]hose who contribute more to an association of this character [who contribute more to good action] have greater share in the polis [and should therefore, in justice, receive a larger recognition from it] than those who are equal to them  in free birth and descent, but unequal in civic excellence, or than those who surpass them in wealth but are surpassed by them in excellence.”

Justice then is dependent on the proper goal of the political order and the citizen’s contribution towards the fulfillment of such a goal.  The just individual is the citizen who acts in a just manner in his/her relations with other citizens. The just polis is the political order that bring into being the just citizens and that generates and maintains the good life through the interactions of these citizens. The polis seems to be a vibrant, reflective and responsive political order, in which the worth of the individual is manifested in the life he lives among others. Thus in Aristotle’s Ethics and Politics, the individual can be just, good and prudent; that is, capable of living the good life. Yet, this individual can only be the citizen of the polis. Women, slaves, and children (also foreigners) do not participate in the good life. Effectively, this marginalizes the majority of the city’s population from political justice. Women and slaves are judged by Aristotle to be only capable of mere life. Mere life is associated with the satisfaction of daily needs, the reproduction of the physical self. Mere life is not, however, the good life, the political life – the life of which the city is for. If justice is dependent upon the polis and the citizens who live in it and if the polis and its citizens are necessarily dependent upon individuals living in mere life to sustain and reproduce them, then the justice of Aristotle is also dependent upon mere life, which it excludes.

In reading Marx, I have not come across the concept of justice expressly identified and discussed except in relation to elucidating the characteristics or elements of the bourgeois ideology. These elucidations are further contextualized by the critique of the bourgeois-capitalist order. In the “Critique of the Gotha Program,” for example, Marx rhetorically asks: “What is ‘a fair distribution’? Do not the bourgeois assert that the present day distribution is ‘fair’? And is it not, in fact, the only ‘fair’ distribution on the basis of the present-day mode of production? Are economic relations regulated by legal conceptions or do not, on the contrary, legal relations arise from economic ones?” Taking ‘fair’ here to mean ‘just,’ Marx seems to be saying that the distribution within capitalist society is just. This is with the proviso that justice is ‘legal conceptions’ that arise from the underlying economic order. Justice in this sense is part of the superstructure that justifies the mode and relations of production in society. It is in this sense that his communist dictum “[f]rom each according to his ability, to each according his needs” is a justice that cannot be imposed within the capitalist society. Properly speaking, it is a conception of justice and justification that arises from the communist economic structure. To read justice in Marx then, it is necessary to assume a hermeneutic stance that has been proposed in this essay as a line of argument (that justice is dependent upon the assumption of specific political order and conception of the individual). What this amounts to is that I assume what I want to argue. Specifically, Marx is read as offering an ideology of a proposed economic order. As such, his critique of capitalist society becomes cases of injustice only from the point of view of the communist society. This stance also implies a skeptical attitude towards Marx historical materialist claim that communism is an inevitable future for humankind.

The concept of justice in Marx can be productively approached negatively by discussing the unjust. Injustice at its most insidious form is alienation and private property. This is precisely the main contention in the “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,” a critique of the capitalist economy that coalesces around the two central concepts of estrangement and private property. The underlying concept in estrangement is estranged labor – the alienation of man from man’s natural activity. This alienation occurs within the capitalist society at several levels: Man’s labor is no longer his/her own and has become the property of another. This occurs through the commodification of his/her productive activity and its reduction to a quantitative, purchasable value. Meanwhile, the product of man’s estranged labor is the externalization of his/her labor. This product is never his/her own as s/he loses it in the process of production. The worker exemplifies this alienation as his/her labor has become external to his being, coerced and bought by another. The alienation of man from his/her labor, both as productive activity and as objectified or material representation of his/her activity, is also an alienation of man from him/herself. Marx asserts that free laboring or unconditioned productive activity is natural to man. This is not only a necessary consequence of his/her need to reproduce him/herself materially – his/her life activity – but also the means to expressing him/herself creatively. A worker’s alienated labor, then, as an activity that no longer belongs to him/her, becomes “self-estrangement.” Further, as estranged labor is never voluntary and as labor is man’s activity that relates him/her directly to nature, self-estrangement becomes an estrangement with nature.

The objectification of man’s labor constitutes an objectified human world produced entirely from human productive activity. This “anthropological nature” is the externalized representation of the social character of man’s productive activity. The human essence, to Marx, is the fact of his/her “species being.” Alienation, thus, invades man’s relation with others and his/her relation to the human world s/he has created with others.  The effect of this is the “estrangement of man from man.” Finally, a particular product as objectified labor and the human world as objectified social labor are, effectively, man and man as species-being objectified. The human world is then the object in the humanity’s contemplation of itself. It facilitates self-recognition and, as such, self-consciousness. Estrangement proscribes this occurrence, which makes it unjust and all the more makes transcendence of estranged labor urgent.

To Marx, private property is the development in history that exemplifies estrangement. It is, at the same time, the product of alienated labor and the means in which the alienation of labor is realized. The transcendence of private property, then, through historical communism becomes the overcoming of estrangement and its effects and the means towards total human emancipation

Yet total human emancipation from the injustice of estrangement brought about in making labor and the product of labor private property could not be achieved by simple reforms in the political order of society. Political emancipation in the form of liberal rights and liberties cannot address the injustice of losing one’s humanity. The critique of the liberal conception of human emancipation in the essay “On the Jewish Question” becomes an opportunity for Marx to explore certain themes that are then treated more extensively in his later writings. In the essay, the specific question of Jewish emancipation is transformed from mere political emancipation and resolved into the “general question of the age.” The importance of the Jewish question then is what it implicates in the place of man in civil society and the state. Marx asserts that the political emancipation of the Jew is also the emancipation of the state from religion. This emancipation is limited, however, as the free or liberated man does not automatically follow from a free state. The supposed emancipation of the Jew and, generally, of man through the state is, thus, dubious and is necessarily incomplete. Emancipation through the ideas of rights and justice has the dangerous effect of blinding us from the human condition of estrangement. The state is itself a domination of man through the abstraction of his/her social or species-being into an ‘unreal universality’ – an erasure of man’s particularity.   Civil society, meanwhile, insists on man’s individuality and separation from community in opposition to the fact of his/her species being. The estrangement of man is consequently double-sided: as state abstraction and as separated/differentiated ego in civil society. Marx asserts that real emancipation occurs with the absorption of the political man into the everydayness of the individual man and his/her self-recognition as a species being. Marx, then, turns the original question on its head when he problematizes what is it of the Jew that humanity needs to liberate itself from. Huckstering, “the worldly cult of the Jew,” and property/money, “his worldly god” are the organizing principles of the bourgeois civil society. They are the targets of transformation for man’s revolutionary quest of self-recognition as social being – for the achievement of real Jewish emancipation as human emancipation.

To Marx then, the injustice of the capitalist society is precisely the opposite of why the polis is just to Aristotle. The capitalist economic and political order separates man from fellow man and proscribes man from developing his/her full potential as creative species being. True justice is achieved only through full human emancipation. This necessitates the abolishment of property and the revolutionary transformation of the means and mode of production, which then results into a new political order. In the communist society, Marx explains, “where nobody has one sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.”

Meanwhile Rawls, in A Theory of Justice, presents “justice as fairness” as a moral, rational and egalitarian conception of justice. It consists in the two principles of justice earlier identified as commitments to equal basic liberties and fair equality of opportunities. The second principle supplies a proviso that any inequality in opportunities should be to the benefit of the least advantaged. These principles are justified with the idea of an original position made impartial through voluntary and disinterested participants. The original position functions as a hypothetical state of nature wherein the principles of cooperation as political community are negotiated. Within this original position, participants are behind a “veil of ignorance” from which no one is aware of their place in society, whether defined by class, status, interest, religion, race, capacities, prospects, etc.; that is,  “no one should be advantaged or disadvantaged by natural fortune or social circumstances.”  The assertion is that in this original position, free persons would choose the two principles of justice over other possibilities. 

Justice as fairness implies several things about the political association of cooperation that it orders. Rawls asserts that the principle of rights (1) is prior to the principle of difference (2). This posits a society that values foremost basic liberal liberties and provides immunities over their infringements. Further, the second principle posits that this same society gives importance to the availability of a minimum of resources (e.g., property) that each person needs to effectively exercise their basic liberties. Inequalities do not necessarily mean injustice to Rawls. Inequalities are only unjust when they are not to the benefit of all. Yet there is the difficulty of ensuring that social institutions only produce inequalities that advantages all. What matters in these instances of inequality is the fair procedure that imparts its fairness to the outcome. Thus, one can interpret the Rawlsian society as coinciding with a liberal democratic order. But there are other sources of difficulty. One that is relevant to this essay is the relationship of the justice with the good. Rawls, for example, provides two theories of the good appropriate to justice conceived as fairness. The thin theory is already illustrated in the original position wherein a minimum conception of the good as equality in right to determine the principles of justice is asserted. Rawls, however, claims that justice is also congruent with the good in the sense of justice as good. In this formulation justice can be conceptualized to be consistent with both thin and thick theories of the good. Justice as good may be attached to moral principles and values, even with rational plans of life that determine what things are good for human beings. This assertion of congruence, to Rawls, resolves the problem of stability of society ordered by justice as fairness. Stability is achieved when the principles of justice are accepted as regulative of personal plans of life.

The problem with stability conceived as congruence between the good and justice is that it assumes, as Aristotle asserts, that society as a whole is oriented towards a common good. At the minimum such a society must have compatible views of the good that its citizens individually pursue. The problem with such an explanation of stability is that it does not give an account of plurality in society, valued by liberal theorists. Rawls in Political Liberalism resolves this contradiction by proposing a reasonable plurality of doctrines of the good life promoted by reasonable persons. Reasonable persons are defined by Rawls as “not moved by the general good as such but desire for its own sake a social world in which they, as free and equal, can cooperate with others on terms all can accept.”Reasonable plurality entails societal institutions that limit plurality to the reasonable and benign. Such institutions are determined by a political conception of justice as fairness. Rawls asserts that political justice is legitimized by citizens’ endorsement but I add the claim that it also produces the citizens that endorse it. The question of stability then becomes: how can a society of reasonable pluralism be stable over time? The question, however, already contains its answer: it is stable because it admits only the reasonable. Rawls’ conception of the person is important here. The person is defined as “someone who can be a citizen; that is, a normal and fully cooperating member of society.” This is the case because the political conception of justice makes the person as such. Rawls claims that when publicized, the “political conception of justice assumes a wide role as part of public culture” that educates the citizens about “a way of regarding themselves that otherwise they would most likely never be able to entertain.” To practice the political conception of justice to the full extent is to “realize a social world within which the ideal citizenship can be learned and may elicit an effective desire to be that kind of person.” Thus, the liberal state produces the reasonable citizen that ensures the reasonableness of privately practiced comprehensive doctrines of the good life. And what of the unreasonable in society? Rawls accepts the fact that there will be unreasonable doctrines about the good life and suggests that they be contained so that they will not undermine the unity of society. In a footnote, Rawls asserts: “That there are doctrines that reject one or more democratic freedoms is itself a permanent fact of life, or seems so. This gives us the practical task of containing them – like war and disease – so that they do not overrun political justice.”

As we can see, Rawls’ amendments on the conception of justice only emphasize what is already apparent in his first book. His conception of justice is dependent upon the assumption of a liberal democratic political order and the conception of the individual as autonomous and possessing of rights prior to the political order. The difference is that his first book provides an account of how liberal citizens produce (albeit hypothetically) the liberal society and his second book provides an account of how the liberal society produces the citizen, all in the name of justice of course.

If there is dearth of actual continuity in the conceptions of justice in Aristotle, Marx and Rawls, this is due to the divergent political orders and views of the individual that their conceptions assume. The primary continuity is precisely this, that justice for these authors is dependent on their conceptions of the right political order and of the individual. Yet, there is a sense in which Aristotle and Rawls converge; that is, they provide an account in which the individuals and the political order are mutually produced. The activity of pursuing and practicing the good life does this for Aristotle. The hypothetical original position that identified the principles of justice and the endorsement of citizens of justice as fairness on the part of the individual and the production of the citizen in publicizing political justice on the part of the political order, do this for Rawls. Meanwhile, Aristotle and Marx defined their conceptions of justice negatively. And to do this, they applied their particular conceptions of justice as critique to political orders that they oppose. Justice in Aristotle is not what democracy and oligarchy conceives of it. In Marx, injustice is what defines the relation of humans with each other, as workers with capitalists, and the relation of citizens with the liberal state. These continuities are of course only demonstrable in a general way. What this essay demonstrates in particular are discontinuities, the reasons for which I have already asserted.

 

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