Many moral disputes come down to questions to justice: What is the just punishment for a crime? What are the components of a just system of health care or taxation? Is there something unjust about racial discrimination--or about "affirmative action?" We can't answer all these questions here, but we can begin to get clear about what justice is.

A Dispute About Justice

        Let us begin our inquiry into the nature of justice with a familiar story:

        The question for us to ask is: Did the householder treat anyone unjustly? Some people have an immediate sympathy with the full day workers, feeling that they are right in their claim that they have been treated unjustly. Others are convinced by the householder's defense and believe no injustice to have been committed. I believe these differing reactions are evidence of divergent basic notions of justice.

Justice as Desert

        Let us look first at the view of justice underlying the sense that there is an injustice in this case.

        One simple account of justice is that justice is giving people what they deserve. Spelling it out a little more, we could say that justice involves distributing benefits and burdens according to to merit. Those who think the householder committed an injustice often think so because they believe that pay (and other rewards) should be given in line with something, that those who do more should get more--and if they don't get more, that an injustice has been done to them.

        We can express this theory more formally as:

Let me call this the "strict desert" view of justice.

        It is this connection to what one deserves that is the core of this account of justice. But before looking further at that aspect, notice that I speak here of what Y deserves from X. The way I have characterized this theory of justice it speaks not abstractly to the question of whether a situation is unjust or whether an injustice has occurred but with the more direct question of whether a particular person (or institution) has acted unjustly toward a specific individual (or group of individuals). It is important then that we accordingly ask what a person deserves from a specified other party instead of what in general the person deserves. You may deserve a grade of A in your literature class, but you don't deserve it from me (unless I was your teacher), so even if someone has acted unjustly toward you, I haven't. This issue of who has acted unjustly may be important to questions of rectifying injustices.

Justice and Generosity

        This account of justice provides the tools for explicating the notion of generosity. We might say:

        If someone pays someone more than they deserve, that is generosity. The householder in our little story suggested he was simply being generous. The notion of desert is central to this understanding of generosity. No matter how much someone gives you, it doesn't count as being generous unless it is over and above what you deserve from that person. If you deserve some vacation time and your boss finally gives in and lets you have it, that is not generosity. On the other hand if you don't deserve it, if you haven't earned it, and the boss lets you have it, then she is being generous. What it is that someone deserves is, of course a tricky question, but one I wish to put off temporarily.³

        One objection needs to be headed off immediately here. Sometimes we deserve something negatively. Suppose a child deserves a light spanking (not to say that this is ever the case) and the parent gives the child a severe beating. Might the parent say he was being "generous" because, after all, he was giving the child "more" than the child deserved? No. Although in some sense we might speak of this as a "generous" beating, we wouldn't say the parent was being generous.⁴

        Similarly a judge who sentences a defendant to ten years in prison when the defendant deserves only ten days in prison is not being generous (at least not to the defendant).

        Nonetheless, this account of generosity highlights a problem with the strict desert of justice. If the account of justice given (in terms of strict desert) is correct, and this account of generosity is right, then one can't in a single action act both justly and generously toward a person (in the same respect, as Aristotle might put it).⁵ If you are giving someone exactly what she deserves from you, then you can't also be giving her more than she deserves. So the laborers had a point here: generosity seems fine, but not if it means that an injustice is being done. And if the account of justice, or acting justly, given here is correct, then these two always conflict. There can't be generosity without injustice.

        But if that is right, then it would seem that either generosity is not the virtue it is thought to be, or justice isn't the virtue it is thought to be. I am not here going to give a complete account of what virtue is,⁶ but one might think two traits can't both be virtuous if having one of the traits rules out having the other.⁷ Indeed, in this case it seems that being generous involves being unjust, and so involves acting viciously (by which I mean "exemplifying a vice," not necessarily violently or nastily).

        But this might be taken simply to indicate that something is amiss with this account of justice. Is it really an injustice towards Y if X gives Y more than what Y deserves? If I pay someone more than they deserve, or give them a higher grade than they deserve, am I really acting unjustly toward them? One might think not. Surely, we tend to think, one can be generous without being unjust. If so, the strict desert view of justice is mistaken. Let us consider replacing it with the following fix:

        Here "at least" must be understood with the clarifications given above about "at least." This comparative term is to be understood as meaning "at least as good as," so that giving a greater punishment is not to be considered as giving someone "at least" what they deserve.

        This account of justice, which we can call the "sufficient desert" account, allows that one can act justly and still generously. If X gives Y less than what Y deserves from X, then X is acting unjustly (and ungenerously) toward Y. If X gives Y exactly what Y deserves from X, then X is acting justly, but not generously, toward Y. But if X gives Y more than what Y deserves from X, then X is not only acting justly toward Y, but acting generously as well.

        Let us look back at the vineyard case from this account of justice. Of course it is tricky to determine what the workers in the field deserved from the vineyard owner, but let us suppose they deserved a fair wage, and let us suppose that the denarius for a day's work was a fair wage. (Given that the initial workers readily, without compulsion, agreed to this wage suggests that it is fair.) Then the vineyard owner gave each worker at least what he deserved. Each worker received pay at a rate at least as good as a denarius per full day. Of course some received a higher wage, particularly those who came at the eleventh hour. But then, according to this sufficient desert account, these last workers were treated justly and generously. So no injustice (on this account) has been done. And what is wrong with generosity?

        But let us translate this into a modern setting. Consider first grades in classes. Suppose a teacher at the end of a semester gives "A"s to the students who have worked hard, written good papers, took and excelled on all the exams, earned 95 points out of a possible hundred. Fine. But further suppose that this same teacher gives an A to those students who failed to show up to all the exams except the final, who never turned in the papers, and who, frankly, didn't do a very impressive job on the final either. The good students are likely to be very upset. Indeed, I predict that the dialogue could parallel that which we found in the vineyard. "I gave you what you deserve, what's your complaint? Do you begrudge my generosity," the teacher may say. "Damn right we do!," the good students are likely to say.

        Why? Is there an injustice here? "Sure," the good students are likely to say. Grades should be given in accordance with what has been deserved, what has been earned. In short, the strict desert notion of justice is the one that is felt to apply here.

        Still it is not the eleventh hour students who are thought to be treated unjustly, as the strict desert account would have it, but students who did get what they deserve, the one's who deserved an A and got it who are being treated unjustly. But why? They are getting what they deserve, aren't they?

        One possible response is that they are not. Their grade of "A" is being cheapened by being given to everyone. These hard workers deserve a real A, not an A devalued by hardcore grade inflation. If this is what seems unjust about the grade case, then it can adequately be understood in terms of the sufficient desert theory.

        Whether one's reward is cheapened by others getting it who don't deserve it is a matter that varies very much with the circumstance. Does the pay that the vineyard workers get become cheapened by the generous pay received by others? In a decent economy and a one shot grape picking season, this generosity is not likely to affect inflation that much.⁸

        Think of another modern case. Suppose you take a job at a certain salary. Then you find that another person, with no greater credentials than your own, has taken a similar position with the same company for a much higher salary. Or that everyone else at the company received a generous year end bonus and you didn't, but not because the boss was at all displeased with your work. "Do you begrudge my generosity [to others]?," the boss asks you when you question her about it. Theorizing aside, I bet you would.

        Something seems unjust or unfair, at least in some situations, about rewards being out of proportion to what is deserved. Something seems basically right in the strict desert model.

Aristotle on Proportion

        This emphasis on desert in an account of justice has a long history. Aristotle put forward a theory in the fourth century B.C. that focused on proportion.

        This, like much of Aristotle's writing, needs to be read slowly to be understood. Notice what Aristotle takes to the origin of quarrels and complaints: just the sort of situation (unequals (in time spent in the field) getting equal shares (pay)) that arose in the vineyard case.

Comparative Distributive Justice

        Aristotle is saying that justice obtains when there is a certain proportion, an equality of the ratio of the shares (what one gets) to the ratio of the merit. If some people work twice as long in the field as others (other differences being presumed, for the example, not to matter) those people ought to be paid twice what the others were. This is the theory of proportional desert. Aristotle is enough of a mathematician to know that this can be re-expressed by saying that the ratio of share to merit should be constant (equal).¹⁰

        So if we let S(g,x) stand for the share (i.e., how much) that x gets of a certain good (or benefit--or burden, for that matter) g, and let F(g,x) be the merit (to be discussed in a moment) that x has in regard to that good, then, according to Aristotle, the distribution of g between individuals a and b is just when:

        This formula can be used in discussing the just distribution of various benefits and burdens.¹¹ The term g may variously be taken to be pay, health care, military duty, pie, education, basketball tickets, food, etc.

        What one actually deserves, what the merit should be proportional to, may be considered different in different circumstances. This is what the function F represents in the above formula. There may be disagreements, of course, concerning what people deserve. I have had students who believe that their grade should reflect not the quality of the work they have done for a course or how well they have learned the material, but how much effort they put into it.

        Aristotle recognizes this room for disagreement when he says "all men agree that what is just in distribution must be according to merit in some sense, though they do not all specify the same sort of merit ..." Here are some examples of possible functions F:¹²

        The first suggests an egalitarian position. Everyone deserves the same. The last one suggests a more capitalist view. How much car do you deserve to have? Whatever you pay for it. The rich person who pays more gets a better car than the poor person. The capitalist thinks this is just. The Marxist, in contrast, subscribes to the dictum of Karl Marx who said "From each according to his ability; to each according to his need." This suggests two different functions depending on whether it is benefits or burdens that are to be distributed.

        So the specifics may vary greatly, but in any case justice on this Aristotelian view is a kind of equality, an equality of proportion. The distribution of g is just when S(g,x)/F(g,x) is constant (equal) over x.

John Stuart Mill on Common Conceptions of Justice

        Of course Aristotle's is not the only account of justice, although it is a popular one, and, as we've seen, a quite flexible one. It allows agreement on the essence of justice (proportion, or equality of ratios) while permitting substantial disagreement on the substance of a theory of justice, about what in any case is just or unjust.

        John Stuart Mill wrote a short book called Utilitarianism in which he defended the moral theory by that name. But in chapter 5 of that book he explored the notion of justice. While he, naturally, defended an account of justice consistent with his utilitarianism, he began his exploration by canvassing several views of what justice is. It is instructive to explore with him these common conceptions of justice.

        1. Respecting Legal Rights

        We don't have to spend much time on this conception. This involves legal notions and for our purposes here we are interested in moral justice. Indeed, Mill quickly considers an emendation to this first view which puts it in the moral realm.

        2. Respecting Moral Rights

        This view is a serious competitor to the general run of desert views. Some people in commenting on the vineyard case suggest that there is no injustice, not because each worker was paid at least what he deserved from the vine owner, but because no one's rights were violated. On this account of justice injustice is simply the violation of rights. An injustice is committed when and only when someone's rights are violated. Of course we could then ask whether anyone has a right to a "fair" wage, independently of any contracts or promises on the part of an employer, but it would be hard to argue that the all day workers had a right to more than a denarius, when that is the wage they had freely agreed to. Maybe in the circumstances one could argue that they deserved more, but they did not have a right to more.

        3. Awarding by Desert

        Here we have an expression of the desert view, which we have already explored at length.

        4. Fidelity

        Mill here expresses a different account of justice, one tied to fidelity more than to desert or rights. It is closer to the moral rights view expressed in the second view, however. The difference is that that view didn't say what the basis of the rights is. This fidelity view doesn't concern itself with whatever rights someone may claim to have. Instead it focuses on promises, express agreements, or contracts. But it goes farther than that. Mill includes implied agreements. If I go into a local lube shop and ask for an oil change, it is implied that I am agreeing to pay for this service, even if I don't actually say I will.

        But Mill doesn't limit himself to such promises, implicit or explicit. He says it is also wrong to "disappoint expectations [knowingly and voluntarily] raised by our own conduct." That is to say, if I know you will expect me to do a certain thing (because of something else I do), then it would be wrong, and indeed unjust for me not to do that.

        You might wonder whether there are counterexamples to this, i.e., cases in which we knowingly and voluntarily raise expectations of a certain action by something we do, but in which it wouldn't be unjust for us not to follow through and undertake that action. If you are having trouble thinking of an example, ask yourself whether it is always unjust to refrain from following through on a threat.

        5. Impartiality

        The notion of partiality which Mill here connects with injustice accounts for many circumstances in which we feel justice has suffered. If someone awards a contract to the firm of a brother-in-law, out of favoritism, when there is a better bid by a competing firm, that smacks of injustice. Notice Mill is careful to speak only of "matters to which favor and preference do not apply." There are times when partiality is just fine. If I decide to invite some people over for dinner but not others, then that is favoritism, to be sure, but there is no inherent injustice in this. A judge, on the other hand, is a prime example of someone who should be influenced only by certain circumstances.

        6. Equality

        Here Mill brings out the notion of equality, which we found so central to Aristotle's proportion view. Here Mill may mean, however, not just equality of proportion, but perhaps even equality of results (as the egalitarian does).

        The last line indicates Mill's utilitarian leanings. By "expediency," he means whatever tends to bring about the best consequences in this case the best consequences for society. So here he is saying that if it turns out that unequal pay (brain surgeons are paid more than typical yard care workers) yields better consequences than equal pay would (by, for example, making sure the most surgically talented people are motivated to attempt to become brain surgeons), then there is no injustice in such inequality. So questions of justice, for Mill, ultimately come down to questions of social utility.

Types of Justice

        So far we've been looking primarily at what has been called distributive justice. But this is not the only area where questions of justice arise. We might, as a first attempt at some categorization, consider three types of justice.

        1. Distributive Justice

        Distributive justice is what we've been exploring so far. It addresses the question of how benefits (education, pay) and burdens (e.g. military service, jury duty, washing the dishes) should be distributed among members of society (or of a group).

        2. Procedural Justice

        But there is another question that might be asked. Not who should bear how much of which burdens and share how much of which benefits, but what procedures or patterns of interaction are just or fair.

        When we speak of an unjust political system we are probably not talking about an unjust distribution of burdens and benefits (although we may). Instead we may mean that there is something unfair about the procedures of that political system. We'll come back to views on procedural justice in a moment.

        3. Rectifying Justice

        Some people think justice basically has to do with punishment, or with righting wrongs. Rectificatory justice is the type of justice that deals with this. The question it addresses is: How is wrongdoing to be treated (e.g., what kind of punishment is appropriate)?

Relations Among the Types of Justice

        No sooner does one get a view of the difference among these three types of justice than they seem to run together again. After all, rectifying justice can understood, can it not, simply as a matter of the just distribution of punishment? And perhaps procedures are unjust, when they are, only because they involve initially, or when applied yield, an unjust distribution of benefits and burdens.

        On the other hand, perhaps everything reduces not to distributive justice but to procedural justice as the most basic kind of justice. Maybe punishment is just when and only when it is arrived at through fair procedures. (Ask yourself this. If a person is falsely convicted of a crime, but is serving time not through any fault of the procedures of the legal system is there an injustice here?) And maybe (this is certainly the view of some philosophers) no distribution of burdens and benefits is inherently unjust. What may be unjust is how that distribution was arrived at. That is to say, the procedures may have been flawed and unjust.

Procedural Justice

        John Rawls, a twentieth century social philosopher from Harvard, is to be credited with calling our attention to the importance of procedural justice and the varieties it may take.

        1. Perfect Procedural Justice

        What Rawls calls "perfect procedural justice" is when there is some independent means of determining what the just outcome would be (e.g., through a theory of distributive justice) and one had a means for guaranteeing that that result would be brought about.

        Police states may be fond of this notion of justice. If we could keep tabs on all citizens, then we would have some perfect means for determining who was guilty of what. Big brother would see it on the monitor. Then justice could simply be dispensed from a machine, practically, without need for trial and jury.

        2. Imperfect Procedural Justice

        Imperfect procedural justice assumes, along with perfect procedural justice, that there is some outcome which is the correct or just outcome. So this view too is dependent upon a theory of distributive justice. But according to imperfect procedural justice the just procedure is that one that is likely to lead to that result, even though no procedure is sure to. So one might feel that a trial by jury with lawyers as adversaries for each side (with various constraints, much like those that are used in many civilized countries) is a procedure which is designed to get the result that the guilty parties are punished and the innocent parties are declared innocent and released. Of course the system doesn't work perfectly, but if it works pretty well at achieving this goal, then it satisfies imperfect procedural justice.

        3. Pure Procedural Justice

        This third notion of procedural justice is different from the first two in that it takes procedural justice to be basic, not derivative upon distributive justice. According to pure procedural justice a result of the procedure is just just in case the procedure is itself fair, not vice versa.

        Suppose you and a friend make a bet on who will win the Superbowl. No cheating goes on. Suppose your friend is independently wealthy, doesn't need any more money and you are strapped for cash. As it turns out your friend's team wins and he wins the bet. You should pay up. Is this unjust? No. There is no injustice here. The outcome is fair because the process (or procedure) was fair. This is the essence of pure procedural justice.

The Veil of Ignorance

        John Rawls in A Theory of Justice went on to detail a system of justice for society which is based on pure procedural justice. His basic idea is that the whatever principles we would agree to ahead of time are principles that are fair (because they would result from a fair procedure). If before you embarked on a journey you would have agreed that the car should pull over if someone got sick, then if someone now gets sick on the journey, then you, if you are driving, should pull over. Of course you might say that you don't now want to pull over. You aren't sick, and you want to make good time. But you didn't know that it wouldn't be you who was sick and you would have (rationally) agreed to that principle (pull over in case of sickness), so now you should abide by it.

        So Rawls imagines that we (or representatives of us all) get together before we enter society with the express purpose of drawing up a set of rules to live by (or principles of justice for the basic structures of society, as Rawls would put it). He needs to consider what would be fair restrictions on the procedures for arriving at this agreement. We must reach agreement by reasoning from available information and not by coercing others into a specific agreement.

        The key component to this "original position," as Rawls terms it, in which we are to decide upon the principles of society is what he calls the "veil of ignorance." It is only fair that we not know our position in the world. We are to decide how society is to be run, not knowing which of us is going to be male or female, slave or free, deeply religious or atheist, rich or poor, healthy or handicapped, talented or good-for-nothing.

        Under those circumstances Rawls feels that rational persons in this original position would be able to reach agreements on certain basic principles by which society should be governed. This, then, for Rawls is the foundation of justice, based, as it is, on the fairness of the underlying procedures, not on the consequent distribution of benefits and burdens.