From order to justice

politics, philosophy & economics

Volumn 4, Issue 2, 2005, Pages 175-194

  Hardin, Russell ^a  

^a NEW YORK UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

Hobbes; Hume; justice; order; Rawls; social science; technology

Indexed keywords

EID: 34248040982     PISSN: 1470594X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/1470594X05052537     Document Type: Article

References (50)

1. Russell Hardin, ‘From Power to Order, From Hobbes to Hume’, Journal of Political Philosophy 1 (1993): 195-207.
2. Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics, 7th edn. (London: Macmillan, 1907), p. 440.
3. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 2nd edn., edited by L.A. Selby-Bigge and P.H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978 [1739-40]), Book 3, Part 2, Section 8, p. 543. Hereafter, citation of Book, Part, and Section will be as follows: 3.2.8.
4. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, edited by C.B. Macpherson (London: Penguin, 1968 [1651]), Ch. 13, [p. 63], p. 188. Here and hereafter references to Hobbes's Leviathan are cited in the following format: chapter number, pagination of the original edition in square brackets, followed by pagination in Macpherson's 1968 Penguin edition.
5. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, T3.2.8, p. 541.
6. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, in Enquiries, 3rd edn., edited by L.A. Selby-Bigge and P.H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975 [1751]), pp. 212–33.
7. Hobbes, Leviathan, Ch. 13, [p. 63], p. 188.
8. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, T3.2.7, p. 538.
9. Thomas Hobbes, De Cive, edited by Howard Warrender (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983 [1642]). See further, Russell Hardin, ‘Hobbesian Political Order’, Political Theory 19 (1991): 156-80, 170-1.
10. See Russell Hardin, One for All: The Logic of Group Conflict (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), Ch. 2.
11. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, T3.2.8, p. 539-41. See also David Hume, ‘Of the Origin of Government’, in David Hume: Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, edited by Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1985 [1748]), p. 39.
12. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976 [1776]), Book 5, Ch. 1, Part 2, pp. 711–5.
13. Harold D. Lasswell, Politics: Who Gets What, When, How (New York: McGraw- Hill, 1936).
14. The first use of ‘norm’ cited in the Oxford English Dictionary is in 1821 and the term is used in the sense of a standard, model, pattern, or type. The next use, in 1828, is in the relevant normative sense.
15. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, T3.2.2, p. 501.
16. We now have extensive evidence on various forms of societal development. See, for example, Allen W. Johnson and Timothy Earle, The Evolution of Human Societies: From Foraging Group to Agrarian State, 2nd edn. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000).
17. Hobbes, Leviathan, Ch. 13, [p. 63], p. 187.
18. In some accounts of distributive justice, there is some notion of what a person ought to get from the larger society or how the person ought to fit into the society. For example, Aristotle proposed distribution according to merit.
19. See Bruce Ackerman, Social Justice in the Liberal State (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980).
20. Gerrard Winstanley, The Law of Freedom in a Platform or, True Magistracy Restored, edited by Robert W. Kenny (New York: Schocken Books, 1973 [1652]).
21. Rawls broadens this claim to include practices such as moral practices and the rules of a game. See John Rawls, ‘Two Concepts of Rules’, Philosophical Review 64 (1955): 3-32.
22. E.F. Carritt, Ethical and Political Thinking (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1947), p. 65.
23. See also, Russell Hardin, Morality Within the Limits of Reason (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 100–5.
24. Rawls, ‘Two Concepts of Rules’, p. 27.
25. John Rawls, ‘Justice as Fairness’, Philosophical Review 67 (1958): 164-94.
26. A static theory of justice in this sense is that of Ackerman, Social Justice in the Liberal State, whose concern is solely to allocate manna from heaven.
27. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, pp. 65–8; Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996 [1993]), pp. 6–7.
28. See, For example, Rawls, A Theory of Justice, pp. 13, 66.
29. See Brian Barry, Theories of Justice (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1989). In comparison to fairness and utilitarian theories, libertarianism, communitarianism, and various religious theories are sideshows in contemporary western political philosophy. Of these, libertarianism has been worked out most extensively, especially by Nozick. See Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974). Perhaps this is because it has liberal roots in Locke and the Scottish Enlightenment. Nozick's articulation of the theory, however, is almost entirely normative and is irrelevant to our messy, real world.
30. Hardin, Morality Within the Limits of Reason, Chs 2, 3. In an astonishing statement, Rawls says ‘that the principle of utility [meaning utilitarianism] is incompatible with the conception of social cooperation among equals for mutual advantage’. See Rawls, A Theory of Justice, p. 13. Here, he means classical Benthamite utilitarianism in which utilities to all are added to reach a maximum sum. Mutual advantage is the central utilitarian principle of Hume. It is absurd to say that this principle is incompatible with utilitarianism. Unfortunately, under ‘mutual advantage’ in Rawls's index, one is referred to ‘reciprocity’, which is not the meaning of mutual advantage in his theory, although it is a way to achieve mutual advantage.
31. See Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, p. 194, quoted below; Tibor Scitovsky, Welfare and Competition (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1952); Arthur M. Okun, Equality and Efficiency: The Big Tradeoff (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1975).
32. F.A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1960), p. 44. See more generally Hardin, Morality Within the Limits of Reason, pp. 126–37.
33. Winstanley, The Law of Freedom in a Platform. Hume may not have read Winstanley. He is very tentative in his statement of the views and program of the Levellers, whose religious fanaticism he detested. See David Hume, ‘Of Superstition and Enthusiasm’, in David Hume: Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, edited by Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1985 [1748]), p. 77.
34. Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, p. 194. Hume also argued that, ‘Perfect equality of possessions, destroying all subordination, weakens extremely the authority of the magistracy, and must reduce all power nearly to a level, as well as property’. This sounds like an aristocratic concern, implying that hierarchy, and hence material inequality, is virtually necessary for achieving many desirable social goals, including governance. Many of the views of Hume cited here were first expressed in Hume's Treatise of Human Nature (published in 1739-40), but they are more accessibly and often more clearly stated in his Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (published in 1751).
35. Scitovsky, Welfare and Competition; Okun, Equality and Efficiency.
36. If our conditions were dramatically different, we would have no concern with justice. This would be true if, for example, there were such plenty that nothing was in short supply or, contrariwise, that there were extreme indigence; it would also be true if we were universally beneficent or universally vicious. See Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, pp. 183–9.
37. F.Y. Edgeworth, Mathematical Psychics: An Essay on the Application of Mathematics to the Moral Sciences (London: Kegan Paul, 1881).
38. Hume, ‘Of Public Credit’, in David Hume: Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, edited by Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1985 [1748]) p. 356.
39. Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, p. 180.
40. See, among many commentaries, Samuel Johnson, as quoted in Boswell, Life of Johnson, pp. 947–8; Mill, Principles of Political Economy, Book 5, Ch. 11, Section 13, p. 960; Tocqueville, ‘Memoir on Pauperism’; Townsend, A Dissertation on the Poor Laws, By a Well-Wisher to Mankind. Also see Hardin, ‘Altruism and Mutual Advantage’.
41. Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, p. 186.
42. J.L. Mackie, Hume's Moral Theory (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980), pp. 93–4.
43. David Hume, The History of England (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1983 [1778]), Ch. 2, p. 290 note.
44. Alternatively, among all of those states in which everyone is equally well off, Rawls's initial state is that state in which they are best off.
45. Rawls, Political Liberalism, pp. 281–2; Okun, Equality and Efficiency.
46. If the side payments are not less than (or at most equal to) the additional resources they lead to, there is no reason to make them.
47. John Mark Hansen, ‘Taxation and the Political Economy of the Tariff’, International Organization 44 (1990): 527-51.
48. A.J.P. Taylor, English History 1914-1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 1.
49. Margaret Levi, Of Rule and Revenue (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988), Ch. 6.
50. I owe this observation to Andrea Pozas-Loyo.