Just Us: A Foundation for a Theory of Justice

Abstract

No person, acting alone, can create society. Despite the self-evidence of this observation, political philosophy has largely failed to come to terms with the extent of its relevance for how we think about justice. The view of justice that dominates political philosophy is stubbornly anti-social, imagining each of us doing what justice asks in parallel. Any need for social interaction is scrubbed out of our theories of justice. In this dissertation, I attempt to articulate what justice looks like when we take its sociality seriously. To start, I distinguish between the perspectives of morality and justice. Justice is usually treated as a subset of morality—justice’s domain is marked out as the corner of moral theory concerned with what we owe to those with whom we share society. But justice finds us in a very different position than morality writ large. When we occupy the moral point of view, we are isolated; we must see our lives from a distance. Justice, however, finds no traction amidst such solitude. To build the just society, we are dependent upon others’ cooperation—we create society with other people. This means that the perspective we adopt towards our obligations of justice is not the perspective we adopt towards our other ethical obligations. Morality would have us view other people as our audience. Justice requires that we see them as partners. Understanding others as our partners in a shared project of creating society transforms the foundations of our theories of justice. In Chapter 1, I argue that the perspective of justice alters how we think of our motivation to do justice. We follow through on our obligations of justice because we want to secure others’ cooperation in realizing our vision for society. In Chapter 2, I argue that the perspective of justice allows us to see that complaints of injustice are best understood as appeals for justification of the speaker’s continued participation in our shared cooperative scheme—not as demands for accountability. In the remaining three chapters, I demonstrate how acknowledging the perspective of justice leads us to revise our accounts of the relationship between justice and politics, the form of our obligations of justice, and the connection between justice in the real and ideal worlds. Conceiving of justice as borne of partnership writes other people back into our theories of justice.