An Introduction to Philosophy, Second Edition

Created March 25, 2024 by Marc Skuster

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 17^th 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 is a meritocracy where everyone has equal opportunity to find his or her appropriate place through a vigorous system of public education. There is some debate about whether Plato was primarily concerned about justice as a meta-virtue for states or individuals in the Republic. He might seem a bit less enthusiastic about aristocracy and rule by an elite if he is taken to be mainly concerned with the just person. But the model he develops in the Republic helped to legitimize a long tradition of top-down governance by kings, religious authority, and military might in the West. It’s only in the last few centuries that ideals of equal individual rights and freedoms begin to gain traction.

We should note at the outset that freedom and equality are both highly ambiguous notions. We can be equal or unequal in a wide variety of different ways. Socialism emphasizes equality of wealth and resources in ways that are liable to frustrate many kinds of freedom. In more liberal traditions, those that emphasize liberty, equality is incorporated in terms of equal liberties, equal treatment before the law, equal opportunity, equal access to public goods, and so forth. Likewise, freedom can be understood in many ways. Freedom can be thought of in negative terms as in being free from the dominance of others or in positive terms as in being free to do what we like with things that are ours. Talk of freedom will refer to freedom from one thing or another or freedom to one thing or another. But there are as many kinds of freedom as there are things we can be free to attain or free from. Economic freedom is one thing, freedom of conscience is another. Then there is freedom of expression, freedom of association, freedom of movement, and so forth. So in order to be clear at all, talk of freedom and equality needs to be fairly specific. Not everyone who claims to love freedom and equality loves the same thing.

In the rest of this chapter we will focus on liberal political philosophy starting with one of its founders, John Locke. We will then examine the thought of the contemporary philosopher John Rawls. What makes a political philosophy a liberal political philosophy is just that it takes liberty in one form or another to be a fundamental virtue of the just state or society. So liberal political thought stands in contrast to both communism on the left and fascism on the right. Liberalism rejects aristocracy, authoritarianism, totalitarianism, oligarchy, and plutocracy (I’ll leave those fancy words for you to look up). Liberal political philosophy, understood literally as political philosophy that places a high priority on liberty, is a broad category of thought that includes both contemporary “liberal” and “conservative” political thinking. While both liberals and conservatives are both pretty much within the broader tradition of liberal political philosophy, you may find John Locke’s thinking to be more in line with contemporary conservativism and John Rawls thought to be more reflective of contemporary political liberals. We’ll begin with John Locke

John Locke: Classical Liberalism

John Locke’s First Treatise on Government was an extended argument against the European system of aristocracy and the alleged divine birth right of rulers. Of course, in a society that had only known government by the rule of kings, this raises an obvious question. If human society is not legitimately organized by the authority of a ruling class, then how is it to be organized?

Locke’s answer is that the authority of government is entirely derived from the consent of its free and equal citizens. According to Locke, in the state of nature (or in the absence of government) people exist in a state of perfect freedom. They are free to pursue their own happiness and well being. But this perfect freedom is not a license to do whatever one likes or treat others as one likes. Rather the freedom to which people have a natural and inalienable right is freedom from domination and coercion by others.

The state of Nature has a law of Nature to govern it, which obliges every one, and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life (The Second Treatise of Government, Chpt. 2 Sect. 6)

By the moral law of nature, one is not justified in assaulting others except as retribution for an injustice they have committed to one’s self. Likewise, one is not justified in taking another’s property except as redress for that person taking or destroying one’s own property. But this state of nature inevitably leads to a state of chaos because people are not very good arbiters of justice in their own case. They are prone to inflate the wrongs committed against themselves and seek too much in the way of redress or retribution.

The establishment of government is justified as a more efficient means of preserving the natural rights of individuals. In joining civil society, we voluntarily turn our right to protect and enforce our individual rights over to the state. The legitimate function of the state is to enforce the rights of equality and liberty that people enjoy by nature. This view places rather strict limits on the legitimate functions of civil government. Where a government exceeds these limits, Locke says people are justified in rebelling against the government.

Just what are the rights and liberties government serves to protect? Self ownership is central to the natural rights equally enjoyed by all. This clearly speaks against slavery and other forms of domination or oppression. If a person own’s herself by natural law, then clearly she can’t also be owned by another. Property rights are then justified as an extension of self ownership. Locke sees all of nature as initially held in common by people. When a person “mixes her labor with the stuff of the earth,” say by planting a tree or fashioning a tool from a branch, she acquires a right to the fruits of her labor as an extension of her right of self ownership. Here Locke offers a compelling philosophical justification for property rights. But Locke also recognizes limits to the extent of property rights. Specifically, persons do not have a right to more property than they can make use of. Above and beyond what one can make use of, the fruits of one’s labor return to the commons and are to be freely available to others.

Robert Nozick and Entitlement

The notion that there is an injustice in funding a social safety net for the less well off with taxes on the more affluent has its roots in a Lockean conception of property rights as natural rights that are closely tied to human liberty. On Locke’s view, when we mix our labor with the stuff of the earth, the fruit of our labor is ours by natural right. It is an extension of our natural right to our own selves. Thus, property rights, on Locke’s view, are closely tied to human liberty. The contemporary philosopher Robert Nozick (1938-2002) extends Locke’s line of thought concerning property rights in his entitlement conception of social justice. On Nozick’s view, any distribution of property and wealth, no matter how unequal, is socially just so long as it was arrived at by just means. Acquiring wealth by one’s labor and then building on that through fair trades (those not involving coercion or deception) will be fair. Taxation beyond what is necessary to keep property rights (and hence human liberty) secure will be an injustice. In fact, it will be a variety of theft. Something along the lines of the views of Locke and Nozick has inspired a good deal of the anti-tax, small government sentiment that has been so influential in U.S. politics for the past 30 years or so. Liberty is seen as closely tied to property rights. To the degree that the government taxes citizens, it takes their property and thereby limits their freedom.

Evaluating Classical Liberalism

Now we will look at two objections to the Lockean/Nozickian conception of justice. The first is commonly known as the Tragedy of the Commons. The second has to do with the role of various social institutions in how we conduct our business and the mismatch between this and the highly idealized and individualistic picture of property rights advanced by Locke and Nozick.

Locke takes the natural world and all the resources in it to be a commonwealth. That is, the earth, the waters, skies, and the various systems they contain are taken to be commonly owned by all. I draw from the resources of nature for raw materials when I create something I can then claim as property. Locke lived in a time when natural resources appeared to be endlessly bountiful and any motivated person who wasn’t happy with the available social arrangements could hop a ship to the new world and homestead a piece of land (albeit one that was likely formerly occupied by Native Americans). If natural resources can be regarded as unlimited, then there is no injustice to me if my neighbor has accumulated great wealth while I have little. This is because my neighbor’s great wealth doesn’t place any restriction on me investing my energy in creating wealth of my own. But if natural resources are limited and my neighbor has claimed much of what is available in the creation of his private property, then my opportunities are limited to that degree. We can no longer sustain the illusion that natural resources are unlimited. And as we bump up against those limits, treating Lockean property rights as a kind of sacrosanct expression of human liberty looks less like justice and more like a recipe for increasingly entrenched inequality.

There is a simple logic to the commons that is worth examining in a bit more detail. Garritt Hardin is well known for his clear articulation of the Tragedy of the Commons in the late sixties. Hardin was mainly concerned about human population, but this is just one instance of a much broader kind of problem. A tragedy of the commons is any case where some commonly held resource gets exhausted to the point where it has little value left to offer. Such a tragedy is bound to occur eventually whenever a commonly held resource is finite and freely utilized by self- interested agents.

Hardin introduces the notion of the tragedy of the commons with a tale about the fate of herdsmen who share a pasture in common. Each herdsman notes that if he runs one more animal on the commonly held pasture, he will get the full benefit of that animal’s value when he takes it to market, but since the pasture is held in common, he will bear only a fraction of the cost of raising the animal. As a result, each herdsman runs an additional animal on the pasture, and then another and another until the finite commonly held pasture is depleted to the point where it is of no use to anyone. Similar stories can be told about fisheries, fresh water supplies, air pollution, and climate change.

Once we have a clear understanding of the logic of the commons, it is equally clear that there are only a limited number of ways to avoid a tragedy of the commons. Again, a tragedy of the commons is the inevitable result whenever we have a finite commons that is freely utilized by self-interested agents. The only way to avoid a tragedy of the commons is to prevent one or another of the conditions that give rise to one. Perhaps we cannot expect individuals to consistently refrain from acting on their own interests. But there remain the possibilities of regulating access to the commons or expanding the commons in some way. In the case of climate change, some mitigation strategies like carbon sequestration can be seen as ways of expanding the commons. The commons in this case is the atmosphere which we use as a sink for carbon when we burn fossil fuels. The CO₂ released by even quite a few cars and furnaces poses no serious problem. But beyond a certain point, carbon emissions become a serious problem. The atmosphere can’t soak up more without disrupting systems we all rely on in many ways.

Attempts to capture carbon and sequester it reduce the load on the atmosphere as a carbon sink. One way to think of this is as a strategy for expanding our overall carbon sink by supplementing the atmosphere with underground carbon storage facilities (or, perhaps more realistically, trees and soil that sequester carbon, too). Another example of expanding the commons would be state- run fish hatcheries to rebuild fish populations depleted through fishing.

In some cases, strategies for expanding the commons aren’t sufficient for avoiding a tragedy of the commons. Given this, only one possible means of avoiding a tragedy of the commons remains and that is regulating the use of the commons. We routinely accept a great number of restrictions on our liberty as a means of avoiding a tragedy of the commons through regulating our use of the commons. In the early 1970s, the air in Southern California was barely breathable due to the pollution from cars. Since then we’ve been required to drive more efficient vehicles that are equipped with an ever more sophisticated array of pollution control technologies. The air of Southern California is still often smoggy, but not as bad as it once was. Requiring pollution controls on cars is a pretty unobtrusive kind of regulation. Sometimes we regulate the use of a commonly held resource by charging people to use it and this can take many forms from campground fees to special taxes based on use like car tabs that fund public transportation (the roadways are a commons that become much less valuable when too many people drive and too few use transit). Sometimes we do this with added limits on the use of a commonly held resource as in the case of fishing licenses with catch limits. Proposals to put a price on carbon in the form of energy taxes or cap and trade systems for carbon emissions are relatively unobtrusive attempts to regulate the use of the atmosphere as a carbon sink. Energy taxes would regulate use of the atmosphere by charging a fee. Cap and trade systems are a bit more complex and involve limits on emissions together with a market mechanism for rewarding innovative ways of cutting emissions.

Once we have a clear understanding of the logic of the commons, it seems pretty obvious that regulating the use of a commons is often called for. The problem for the Locke/Nozick line of thinking about social justice is that it affords us no adequate way of justifying the limitations on liberty that are necessary for avoiding a tragedy of the commons. Avoiding a tragedy of the commons sometimes requires that some liberties yield to regulation and that we have government that does more than just guarantee our personal liberties (especially those sacrosanct property rights). While taking such measures can be necessary for avoiding a tragedy of the commons, they may also be difficult to reconcile with the Locke/Nozick conception of social justice. And in some cases, notably climate change, failing to avoid a tragedy of the commons looks like a pretty clear injustice to those who must live with the consequences.

The second objection to the view of social justice advanced in Locke and Nozick is that it doesn’t correspond very well to the realities of our economic lives. We don’t create wealth from our own labor in a social vacuum. With the possible exception of the vegetables I grow in my garden, none of my wealth is entirely the product of mixing my labor with the stuff of the earth. Rather, nearly all of our productive activity is carried out in the context of a complex fabric of social interrelations buoyed by a substantial technological infrastructure. Enjoying the fruits of my labor nearly always requires doing business with someone else and the benefits that accrue to me depend as much on the favorable social environment that makes doing my business possible as it does on the efforts I contribute to the deal. In light of this, the view of property rights offered by Locke is unrealistically individualistic. The Locke/Nozick approach to social justice is like field biologists aiming to secure the welfare of specific cute furry mammals without giving any regard to the health of the ecosystem that sustains them.

Having a functioning well-ordered community is a necessary condition for succeeding in most lines of business (arguably even for gangsters and pimps). The businessman who has profited from a fair exchange with his customers has not thereby paid his dues in maintaining the social environment that makes it possible for him to do his business in the first place. His success requires a healthy and well educated workforce, stability in the economic system, a citizenry that is well informed enough to politically sustain just social institutions, a citizenry that respects the law, a customer base that is doing well enough themselves to afford his product and so forth.

Supporting the social institutions that make the success of the affluent possible will only look like “redistribution of wealth” to those who have it in their head that their income before taxes is their own wealth that is being taken from them to pay for the needs of others. People who see things this way already have grabbed more than they are entitled to.

We live cradle to grave supported by an intricate social and technological infrastructure. As is the want of human beings, we are quick to take all the credit for our success and project all of the blame for our failures onto the external world. Neither inclination is correct very often. But when taking credit for all of our successes manifests itself in reluctance to support the social institutions and arrangements that have made our success possible, we become freeloaders.

Quite a few institutionalized practices tilt the scales in favor of the well to do in such a way that their affluence is, to a significant degree, the product of those social arrangements. Perhaps the most significant example is public education. The high earners in our society are very often the success stories of public education from K-12 through the state university. Even those who come from a wealthy background and enjoyed the benefits of elite private education have depended on publicly educated employees and associates through all of their business endeavors. Public education plays such a large and pervasive role in the development and sustenance of our affluent high-tech society that virtually no lasting economic achievement in this society could happen without public education. Looking ahead to the innovations and skills that will drive future economic development, we neglect adequately funding education at our own peril.

Much the same could be said for publicly financed research at our universities. We frequently look to the achievements of information technology companies like Microsoft as models of private sector initiative and wealth creation. But the very possibility of businesses like Microsoft is the product of decades of public investment in basic research by public institutions like universities and the military. More specifically, the development of information technology is also the product of public investment in basic research by, yes, philosophers. We could not have information technology as we know it and all of the economic growth it has brought over the past few decades without having paid the salaries of philosophy professors like Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead who developed the formal logic that provides the theoretical foundation for programming languages.

Once the Lockean conception of property rights as sacrosanct expressions of human liberty is uprooted, we need to reconsider just how we ought to think of property rights. I think Locke is on to an important piece, namely that we should get to enjoy the fruits of our efforts without others freeloading off of our efforts. But the question of who is freeloading under what circumstances is much more subtle and complex than Locke could have imagined in the absence of more contemporary sociological factors and insights. As we’ll see shortly, the most influential liberal political philosopher of the 20th century, John Rawls, incorporates this anti-freeloading piece into his conception of justice as fairness.

John Rawls

The theory of justice developed by John Rawls (1921-2002) is captured in terms of these two principles:

The Equal Liberty Principle: Each person is to be granted the greatest degree of liberty consistent with similar liberty for everyone.

The Difference Principle: Social practices that produce inequalities among individuals are just only if they work out to everyone’s advantage and the positions that come with greater reward are open to all.

The Equal Liberty Principle has a longer history. The idea that everyone should be granted the greatest degree of liberty consistent with similar liberty for others is defended at length in John Stuart Mill’s essay On Liberty. In fact we could take some variation on this principle as the core tenet of Liberalism as a political theory. This principle doesn’t tell us that people should be free to do as they please no matter what. At some points, my being free to do something is liable to interfere with your being free to do something. For instance, my being free to host parties with live bands into the early hours of the morning might interfere with my neighbor’s being free to get a decent night’s sleep. In the interest of maximizing equal liberty for all, we would be justified in restricting people from activities that would interfere with the liberty of others. This has many familiar applications. Neighborhood zoning regulations are one example. Much environmental regulation would be another. Maximizing liberty for all equally might require that we restrict businesses from being free to pollute where doing so would adversely affect the health of others.

The Equal Liberty Principle is only concerned with equality of liberty. But we can be equal or unequal in many other ways. In fact, being equally free is liable to lead to other sorts of inequalities. If we are all free to plant apple trees or to do something else as we see fit, the end result likely to be a very unequal distribution of apples. So long as this is merely the result of people exercising their equal liberties, there is nothing unfair about this. If I’d wanted more apples, I could have spent more time growing apple trees and less time playing chess.

Among the principles of social justice Rawls would have guide the development of our social institutions (including property rights) is the difference principle which allows that practices of social institutions that generate inequalities (like those that include a market economy) are just so long as they don’t allow some individuals to profit at the expense of others. Another way to formulate this principle is to say that under a just set of social institutions the least well off are better off than the least well off would be under alternative arrangements. This allows for inequalities in a society, so long as they are not enjoyed by some at the cost of the least well off being worse off than they might have been.

Specific social policies produce different results depending on the circumstances of the community and other policies. So, for instance, universal health care in a soviet style command economy might bankrupt everyone. But it might be compatible with a high degree of affluence in an economy that has a healthy market based private sector (think Japan or Sweden). For this reason, social policies must ultimately be evaluated for justness as parts of comprehensive sets of social institutions. This leads to lots of abstract technicalities in Rawls' writing (it is not recommended for the novice). But we can get the general idea by looking at pretty familiar practices and comparing how they perform in the context of different societies having different comprehensive sets of social institutions.

Looking at property rights and the market economy, we might consider East and West Germany prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall. East Germany had a Soviet style command economy that dictated a high degree of equality and sharply restricted property rights. West Germany had a mixed economy with a healthy market based private sector. The result was less equality in West Germany. But still, the least well off were substantially better off than the least well off (pretty much everybody) in East Germany. What this indicates is that while, on the one hand, the market economy with its institutions of private property inevitably generates inequalities, it is, still, so much more effective at generating wealth that the least well off will be better off in spite of the inequalities.

The example of the market economy and its institutions of private property provides a major motivating factor for Rawls' difference principle. So the 20th century’s reigning liberal political philosopher is a fan of market economies and institutions of private property. This may come as a surprise to some.

Where Rawls is going to differ from Locke and Nozick is that for Rawls, property rights are not inviolable sacrosanct extensions of natural human liberty, rather they are social arrangements that will be limited in various ways as a part of a more comprehensive package of social arrangements that aims at fairness. Indeed, the very title of Rawls' major work on social justice is “Justice as Fairness.” The kind of fairness that Rawls' conception of justice aims at is not guaranteed equality of outcome for all, but rather a system of social arrangements that doesn’t advantage any particular group of individuals at the expense of others. Inequalities that result from excellence, helpful innovation or hard work are fair in this sense. But inequalities that result from social institutions that are biased in one way or another towards the interests of some at the expense of others are not. Within this context, property rights are seen as social arrangements that aim at fairness by allowing the excellent and diligent to enjoy the rewards of their efforts. But property rights on the Rawlsian approach are not inviolable natural rights to be secured even to the detriment of maintaining the social institutions that make an affluent society possible.

So far, it should be clear how the a Rawlsian approach to property rights allows for taxing the well off in order to provide things like education, health care and a social safety net for others. But to what degree will this be just on Rawls’ view. Clearly taxing the successful members of society to the point where they are no better off than those who are largely unproductive will not meet the Rawlsian ideal under the difference principle. If people are not rewarded for hard work and innovation, then it’s liable not to happen and everyone suffers as a result. Too much taxation of the well off will be unjust on Rawl’s view precisely because it doesn’t work out to benefit of least well off (or anyone else). Rather, Rawls would aim for that sweet spot where the hard working and innovative are well rewarded, so everyone has a reason to do their best, and yet those who fail for whatever reason, are not left by the wayside, but still have opportunity and enjoy some modest quality of life.

I won’t try to get more specific about just where that sweet spot lies (say in terms of top marginal tax rates on income or capital gains), nor will I try to get more specific about just what benefits and opportunities should be secured for the least well off. But I will finish with a bit about how Rawls motivates the general approach to social justice. And this will ultimately provide the best guide to what set of social arrangements would be just.

Recall that Rawls is aiming at a conception of justice as fairness in the sense that social institutions won’t advantage any particular kind of person at the expense of others. Rawls proposes that we can get onto the ideal of justice as fairness in this sense by means of a thought experiment that involves reasoning from what he calls "the original position." From the original position, we imagine that we are perfectly rational agents with full information about the consequences of the various possible social arrangements. We are then given the task of designing the principles of justice that will structure our society, and we are expected to do so with an eye to what will be in our own best interest. But there is a catch. In reasoning from the original position, we operate behind a veil of ignorance about our own personal circumstances and characteristics. So in the original position, behind the veil of ignorance, I must think about what set of social institutions will work out best for me without knowing whether I will be weak or strong, healthy or diseased, clever or dull, beautiful or ugly, black or white, born to a wealthy family or a poor one and so forth. If I am rational and self interested, I will want to set things up so that I can substantially enjoy the benefits if I have characteristics that are highly valued in my society and I put them to good use. But at the same time, I will want to hedge my bets to assure that I still have a decent life in case I am not so lucky or my best efforts fail.

Review and Study

Review Questions:

Explain Plato’s conception of justice. How does it differ from contemporary liberal views of justice?
Why is Plato no fan of democracy?
In what way does Locke see us as having a natural right to liberty?
What is the function of government according to Locke and how is it justified?
How does Locke justify property rights?
Explain the tragedy of the commons and how it presents a challenge to a Lockean conception of property rights.
How does the creation of wealth and property in our society differ from the idealized individualistic conception Locke offers?
Explain Rawls’ two principles of social justice as fairness.
How does Rawls’ employ the idea of the original position and the veil of ignorance in supporting his principles of social justice?

Names, Concepts, Terms:

Plato
Meritocracy
John Locke
Liberalism
State of Nature
Natural Rights
Robert Nozick
Justice as Entitlement
Tragedy of the Commons
John Rawls
Equal Liberty Principle
Difference Principle
Justice as Fairness
The Original Position
Veil of Ignorance

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