Justice: A conservative view

Social Philosophy and Policy

Volumn 23, Issue 2, 2006, Pages 88-108

  Kekes, John ^a  

^a STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK   (United States)

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EID: 33745665059     PISSN: 02650525     EISSN: 14716437     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0265052506060183     Document Type: Review

References (32)

1. This question was suggested to me by W. D. Ross, The Right and the Good (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946/1930), 138: "If we compare two imaginary states of the universe, alike in total amounts of virtue and vice and pleasure and pain present in the two, but in one of which the virtuous were all happy and the vicious miserable, while in the other the virtuous were miserable and the vicious happy, very few people would hesitate to say that the first was a much better state of the universe than the second."
2. "It is not the most beautiful and the strongest that are crowned but those who compete." Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1099a3-4, trans. W. D. Ross
3. revised by J. O. Urmson, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984).
4. In formulating this view, I drew on the rapidly growing body of work on what it means to say that something is or is not deserved. See, e.g., Joel Feinberg, "Justice and Personal Desert," in Nonws VI: Justice, ed. Carl J. Friedrich and John W. Chapman (New York: Atherton, 1963);
5. William Galston, Justice and the Human Good (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980);
6. John Kekes, Against Liberalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), chap. 6;
7. David Miller, Social Justice (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976);
8. Michael J. Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982);
9. and George Sher, Desert (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987).
10. I am, of course, referring to egalitarian theories of justice. This is not the place for a detailed criticism of them. I offer such criticism in The Illusions of Egalitarianism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003).
11. For instance, "All humans have an equal basic moral status. They possess the same fundamental rights, and the comparable interests of each person should count the same in calculations that determine social policy.... These platitudes are virtually universally affirmed. A white supremacist or an admirer of Adolf Hitler who denies them is rightly regarded as beyond the pale of civilized dialogue." Richard Arneson, "What, If Anything, Renders All Humans Morally Equal?" in Singer and His Critics, ed. Dale Jamieson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 103. "We cannot reject the egalitarian principle outright, because it is ... immoral that [the government] should show more concern for the lives of some than of others."
12. Ronald Dworkin, Sovereign Virtue (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 1. "[A] distribution of wealth that dooms some citizens to a less fulfilling life than others, no matter what choices they make, is unacceptable, and the neglect of equality in contemporary politics is therefore shameful."
13. Ronald Dworkin, "Equality-An Exchange," Times Literary Supplement (December 1, 2000), 16. "Some theories, like Nazism, deny that each person matters equally. But such theories do not merit serious consideration."
14. Will Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community, and Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 40. "Any political theory that aspires to moral decency must try to devise and justify a form of institutional life which answers to the real strength of impersonal values" and "impersonal values" commit one to "egalitarian impartiality."
15. Thomas Nagel, Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). All critics of egalitarianism then fail in moral decency. Just imagine the wave of indignation that would descend on someone who would dare to say such things about defenders of egalitarianism.
16. For a full defense of conservatism, see John Kekes, A Case for Conservatism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998).
17. "The idea of rewarding desert is impracticable." John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 312.
18. See also Friedrich A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), chap. 6.
19. "Non-utilitarian moralities with robust substantive equality ideals cannot be made coherent." Ameson, "What, If Anything, Renders All Humans Morally Equal?" 126. "The justification of the claim of fundamental equality has been held to be impossible because it is a rock-bottom ethical premise and so cannot be derived from anything else." Brian Barry, "Equality," Encyclopedia of Ethics, ed. Lawrence C. Becker and Charlotte B. Becker (New York: Garland, 1992), 324. "Equality is one of the oldest and deepest elements in liberal thought and it is neither more nor less 'natural' or 'rational' than any other constituent in them [sic]. Like all human ends it cannot be defended or justified, for it is itself which justifies other acts."
20. Isaiah Berlin, "Equality," Concepts and Categories, ed. Henry Hardy (London: Hogarth, 1978), 102. Equality "is not grounded on anything more ultimate than itself, and it is not demonstrably justifiable. Ft can be argued further against skeptics that a world with equal human rights is a more just world ... a less dangerous world ... and one with a more elevated and civilized tone. If none of this convinces the skeptic, we should turn our back on him and examine more important problems."
21. Joel Feinberg, Social Philosophy (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1973), 94 (emphasis in original). "Every plausible political theory has the same ultimate source, which is equality.... A theory is egalitarian... if it accepts that the interests of each member of the community matter, and matter equally.... [I]f a theory claimed that some people were not entitled to equal consideration from the government, if it claimed that certain kinds of people just do not matter as much as others, then most people in the modern world would reject that theory immediately."
22. Will Kymlicka, Contemporary Political Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 4-5. Another author says that he will explore a "type of argument that I think is likely to succeed. It would provide a moral basis for the kind of liberal egalitarianism that seems to me plausible. I do not have such an argument." This does not stop him, however, from claiming that "moral equality, [the] attempt to give equal weight, in essential respects, to each persons' point of view ... might even be described as the mark of an enlightened ethic."
23. Nagel, Mortal Questions, 108 and 112. Years later he says: "My claim is that the problem of designing institutions that do justice to the equal importance of all persons, without unacceptable demands on individuals, has not been solved," but he nevertheless "present [s] a case for wishing to extend the reach of equality beyond what is customary in modern welfare states."
24. Nagel, Equality and Partiality, 5. "Essential equality is ... equality of consideration.... [O]f course none of this is literally an argument. I have not set out the premises from which this conclusion follows."
25. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 507, 509. Another author offers "a coherent, systematic, non-ad hoc method for accommodating, explaining, and ultimately guiding our egalitarian judgments. ... [Although I think most of the arguments that have been offered against equality can be refuted, let me emphasize that this book is neither a defense, nor an attack on, the ideal of equality. I do not address the question of whether one should care about inequality."
26. Larry Temkin, Inequality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 5-6.
27. See Harry Frankfurt, "Equality as a Moral Ideal," in his The Importance of What We Care About (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
28. "All men think justice to be a sort of equality.... But there still remains a question: equality or inequality of what?" Aristotle, Politics, 1282bl6-22, trans. B. Jowett
29. in Barnes, ed., The Complete Works of Aristotle.
30. By a theory of justice I mean a structured argument that begins with well-established premises and deduces from them the conclusion of what justice must be if the premises are true. The most notable attempt to provide such a theory is John Rawls's. The attempt does not succeed. See my The Illusions of Egalitarianism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), esp. chap. 4.
31. "The work of the philosopher consists in assembling reminders for a particular purpose." Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, no. 127, trans. Elizabeth Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958).
32. "He who would do good to another, must do it in Minute Particulars / General Good is the plea of the scoundrel hypocrite & flatterer." William Blake, "Jerusalem," chapter 3, plate 55, II. 60-61.