Critically evaluate the view that justice is available in society
Justice is best understood as the satisfaction and maintenance
of rights, "Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as
truth is of systems of thought" (Rawls 1993). Justice can be viewed
as comprising of two main broad divisions, distributive justice and
retributive justice, these will be outlined and analysed in the
following. The former is concerned with the distribution of
desirable things, i.e. influence, money, respect, land, between
people who are thought to deserve it.
Theories of distributive justice need to address three central
concerns, namely, what is to be distributed? Between whom shall it
be divided? What is the most just method of distribution? The
first, relatively simple principle of distributive justice is
strict egalitarianism, which advocates the allocation of equal
material goods to all members of society. This principle is most
commonly justified as the most effective way of guaranteeing that
people have equal respect is through having equality in material
goods and services. Problems for this principle are the
construction of appropriate indices for measurement (referred to as
the index problem) and the specification of time frames. The
principle stipulates that there should be the same level of
material goods and services, the problems is how to specify these
levels. One attempt to solve this problem is to allocate the same
bundle of goods instead of the same level. So, everybody would be
given 2 loaves of bread, one laptop, 4 apples etc. The main problem
with this system is that there will be many other configurations of
goods and services that would make some people better off without
making anybody else worse off, i.e. a person preferring apples to
bread will be better off trading part of her bundle with somebody
who has a greater preference for bread. It is likely that most
people would have some item or other that they could trade in order
to make themselves better off. Consequently, allocating identical
bundles will make almost everybody worse off than they potentially
could be under some other allocation so some index for measuring
the value of goods and services is required. Money is an index for
the value of goods and services but it is an imperfect one, and
other indices must be grafted onto this structure to take account
of goods that are not material, such as opportunities. Other
criticisms of this approach are that is unduly restricts freedom
and does not pay any due to what people deserve. The most common
criticism, however, is a welfare based one: that people can be
materially better off if incomes are not strictly equal, it is this
fact that inspired the Difference Principle (Rawls 1993).
In an effort to redress the perceived callousness of the
retributive system there is a utilitarian variety of this system.
Under utilitarianism, punishment cannot be good in itself, but may
be considered a necessary sacrifice in order to increase overall
utility in the long term. It may do this in one of the following
ways, the threat of punishment may deter people from making choices
which would decrease overall utility; punishment might have the
effect of rehabilitating wrongdoers so that their future actions
maximise welfare; for those who are unrecoverable sociopaths,
imprisonment would protect against their crimes and the attendant
decrease of utility. A criticism of this approach is that, as
before, it is difficult to produce an index of utility. Elster
(1991) writes that (1) It is not possible to combine all the
diverse goods into a single index of 'utility' which can measured
for an individual; (2) Even if you could do the necessary weighing
and combining of the goods to construct such an index for an
individual, there is no conceptually adequate way of calibrating
such a measure between individuals.
There are diverse conceptions of justice and how justice is to
be best achieved. The social contract theorists, including Hobbes,
Locke and Rousseau, asserted that justice is tied to the democratic
system, where citizens and government are both party to a social
contract that grants consent to legitimate rule by government.
Marxist theories of justice embrace some variety of strict
egalitarianism. However we care to define justice, it is
clear that our need for a system of justice ensures it is a
fundamental tenet of any modern society, one which is and indeed
must be attainable and striven for if society is to cohere in any
useful and harmonious sense. Although justice is ultimately
an ideal, and one from which we often fall short, we must continue
our pursuit of it in order to maintain peace and the welfare of the
citizenry.
