Precarious Life: Butler's Ethics of Vulnerability and Interdependence

In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, Judith Butler turned her attention from gender theory to questions of violence, grief, and political responsibility. The resulting work represents a significant evolution in her thinking, moving toward what we might call a philosophy of precariousness—an ethics grounded in our shared vulnerability and fundamental dependence on others.

Shared Vulnerability and Grievability

Butler begins with a simple but profound observation: we don't choose our dependencies. From birth, we rely on others for care, recognition, and survival. This reliance never entirely ends; throughout our lives, we remain vulnerable to loss, injury, and the withdrawal of support. Our lives are, in Butler's terms, precarious—exposed to forces beyond our control, dependent on networks of care and recognition we didn't choose and can't fully secure.

What makes this observation ethical rather than merely descriptive is Butler's argument that recognizing our shared precariousness should transform how we respond to others. If my own life depends on being recognized as grievable—as a life that would be mourned if lost—then I have a stake in ensuring that other lives are recognized as equally grievable. The question "whose lives count as lives?" becomes urgent and political.

Butler argues that dominant political frameworks distribute precariousness unevenly. Some lives are protected, valued, and publicly mourned when lost, while others are treated as disposable, their deaths barely registered. After 9/11, she observed how American grief was mobilized to justify violence against populations whose own losses would not be counted or mourned. The asymmetry in which lives are considered grievable underlies the ability to wage war with a clear conscience.

An Ethics of Interconnection

This analysis leads Butler to a critique of national frameworks that divide humanity into those who merit protection and those who don't. She challenges the notion that our ethical obligations stop at national borders or extend only to those we recognize as "like us." Instead, she proposes an ethics based on our shared vulnerability—what she calls our "precarious life" in common.

But Butler's ethics of precariousness isn't simply a call for universal recognition or inclusion. She's interested in how our dependencies make us relational subjects, fundamentally connected to others in ways we don't control. This means accepting that we're partially opaque to ourselves, formed by relationships and histories we didn't choose. It means acknowledging that the other person exceeds my capacity to know or understand them fully.

This emphasis on vulnerability and dependence might seem to counsel passivity, but Butler sees it differently. Recognizing our precariousness can motivate fierce political action—not to transcend vulnerability by securing absolute safety, but to challenge the unequal distribution of precariousness and to build more robust networks of care and support. The goal isn't invulnerability but a world where everyone's vulnerability is acknowledged and addressed.

Butler's ethics thus offers an alternative to both liberal individualism (which fantasizes about autonomous, self-sufficient subjects) and identity politics (which can reinforce boundaries between "us" and "them"). Instead, she proposes an ethics and politics grounded in our fundamental interconnection, our shared exposure to loss and harm, and our common need for recognition and care.

Paul Ricoeur on Ethics and Justice

For Paul Ricoeur, ethics and justice are not abstract concepts detached from human life but emerge from the ways people interpret themselves, their actions, and their relationships with others. Across his writings, especially Oneself as Another (1990), The Just (1995), and Reflections on the Just (2007), Ricoeur articulates an ethical vision grounded in hermeneutics—the interpretation of human existence, narratives, and institutions.

The Ethical Aim: The Good Life with and for Others

Ricoeur defines ethics as “the aim of the good life, with and for others, in just institutions.” This well-known formula contains three key dimensions:

1. The Good Life – An Aristotelian element: human flourishing (eudaimonia), the pursuit of a meaningful life.

2. With and For Others – An emphasis on relationality: ethical life is not solitary but built on recognition, reciprocity, and responsibility.

3. In Just Institutions – A political and social dimension: ethics must be embedded in fair and legitimate structures, from laws to communities.

This definition reveals Ricoeur’s distinctive synthesis of Aristotle’s teleological ethics and Kant’s deontological ethics, held together by a hermeneutics of selfhood and responsibility.

Justice as the Extension of Ethics

While ethics concerns the “good life,” justice arises when human beings confront the need to regulate competing claims fairly. Ricoeur views justice as the public expression of ethics, particularly where conflicts of interest and values cannot be resolved by personal generosity or private morality alone.

Justice therefore requires institutions—courts, laws, and procedures—that embody fairness. But Ricoeur insists these institutions must remain open to interpretation and critique, avoiding the rigidity of pure legalism. Justice is not just about rules; it is about ensuring that institutions remain aligned with the ethical aim of human flourishing.

The Role of Recognition

A central thread in Ricoeur’s ethical thought is the concept of recognition. Justice requires not only fair distribution of goods but also the recognition of persons as subjects of dignity. In this way, Ricoeur extends ethics beyond material fairness toward the affirmation of identity, respect, and human worth.

Recognition bridges the personal and political: it is how individuals are seen within communities and how institutions affirm the equality of citizens.

Practical Wisdom and Moral Conflict: From Ethics to Politics

Ricoeur acknowledges that ethical life often involves tragic conflicts where duties and goods clash. Here, he appeals to practical wisdom (phronesis), drawing again on Aristotle. Justice is not about applying universal rules mechanically but about discerning the right course of action in concrete situations. This allows his ethics to remain sensitive to pluralism, ambiguity, and the complexities of human life.

For Ricoeur, justice links individual responsibility to collective structures. He insists that just institutions—laws, courts, and political systems—are the conditions for living ethically with others. Yet he also warns that institutions can become oppressive if detached from their ethical aim. This tension calls for a continual hermeneutics of justice: interpreting, critiquing, and reforming institutions so they remain truly just.

The Hermeneutics of the Good Life

Ricoeur’s conception of ethics and justice is both personal and political, both philosophical and practical. His definition—“the good life, with and for others, in just institutions”—captures a vision of ethical life that integrates flourishing, responsibility, and fairness.

In a world of plural values and social conflicts, Ricoeur offers a framework where ethics becomes not only a personal aspiration but a shared project of building just institutions. His thought remains a vital resource for contemporary debates on democracy, law, and human dignity.

Articles by and on Ricoeur

Paul Ricoeur and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion 

Paul Ricoeur's concept "Symbol Gives Rise to Thought"

Conceptual Framework of Action

Surplus of Meaning

Explanation and Understanding

Ricoeur's Concept of Distanciation

Appropriation

Narrative Identity

Living Metaphor

Emplotment

Second Naïveté

Biblical Hermeneutics

Noteable Books and Articles by Ricoeur

Conflict of Interpretations

The Symbolism of Evil 

The Rule of Metaphor

Time and Narrative

Glossary of Paul Ricoeur’s Hermeneutics

Rethinking Critical Theory at the Edge of the Human: On Animal Crisis by Alice Crary and Lori Gruen

What if our most sophisticated critiques of capitalism, race, and gender still rely on a blind spot—the assumption that the human stands apart from the animal? In Animal Crisis: A New Critical Theory, philosophers Alice Crary and Lori Gruen insist that this blind spot isn’t incidental; it is constitutive. The result is a slim but urgent book that aims to rewire critical theory so it can confront the intertwined crises of animal exploitation, environmental collapse, and social injustice.

Context: From Domination of Nature to Interdependence

Crary and Gruen enter a tradition—Adorno and Horkheimer, Fanon, Butler—that has long examined how domination works and reproduces itself. But while the Frankfurt School diagnosed the “domination of nature,” animals rarely appeared as political subjects. Crary and Gruen close that gap. For them, the animal question is not a niche ethical add-on; it is a structural feature of modern power. Factory farms, extractive landscapes, and biosecurity regimes are not parallel to racialized labor or gendered violence; they are entangled with them.

The authors also position their project against two familiar footpaths. On one side, the formal moralism of rights-talk that treats animals as units of welfare; on the other, a technocratic pragmatism that hopes innovations—lab-grown meat, better cages—can finesse the problem. Both, they argue, leave intact the forms of life that make mass animal harm intelligible and permissible.

Theory Snapshot: Moral Perception, Entangled Lives

Crary, known for work on moral perception, and Gruen, known for “entangled empathy,” build a shared method: ethics is not a ledger of principles but a practice of attention. Our capacity to see animals as subjects is shaped by social arrangements—markets, media, institutions—that dull perception. Critical theory, then, must be emancipatory at the level of vision: it must help us learn to notice animals as participants in our moral world.

This is not sentimentality. The book argues that the human/animal divide props up hierarchies among humans. Dehumanization works by animalization. Conversely, widening our circle of moral attention helps unmake those hierarchies. The point is political: transforming how we live with animals requires transforming the systems that sort lives into killable and ungrievable.

Case in Point: Pandemics, Prisons, and Supply Chains

Where the book is strongest is in its case-based analyses. The authors read zoonotic disease not as “nature’s revenge” but as the predictable outcome of global supply chains that compress species into intimate, lethal proximity. They link industrial meat production to climate crisis and to labor regimes that render certain workers—often migrants and the poor—disposable. They track how carceral logics extend across species: control, confinement, surveillance. In each arena, animals are not metaphors; they are co-victims and—when we pay attention—co-constituents of resistance.

This insistence reshapes familiar debates. Veganism is treated not as a purity ethic but as one tool within broader coalitions for food justice. Conservation is evaluated not by headline species counts but by whether it dismantles or reinscribes colonial land politics. Even hopeful technologies are approached with caution: progress that preserves exploitative forms of life is, by their lights, not progress.

A Provocation with Teeth

As a piece of philosophical writing, Animal Crisis is admirably clear. It compresses a great deal—Murdoch’s moral attention, Wittgensteinian forms of life, feminist and postcolonial critique—without losing the thread. Readers looking for a comprehensive policy program will not find it here; the book is diagnostic and normative more than procedural. Its power lies in reorientation. After reading, arguments that bracket animals as “special interest” feel oddly anachronistic.

There are tensions. The emphasis on attention risks sounding overly pedagogical—can seeing differently scale against agribusiness? Yet the authors anticipate this worry: attention is not a mood but a political practice that informs organizing, law, and everyday consumption. A second tension is strategic: entanglement can make action feel diffuse. But here the book’s wager is compelling—if the crises are entangled, so must be our remedies.

Why It Matters

Animal Crisis clarifies a cultural turning point. Animal ethics has moved from the margins of analytic debates about pain to the center of questions about democracy, labor, race, climate, and care. For scholars, the book extends critical theory’s franchise to nonhuman life without evacuating politics of specificity. For activists, it offers a language to build coalitions that don’t trade off harms across species lines. And for the rest of us, it reframes a daily ethical field—from what we eat to how cities plan for multispecies life—less as private virtue and more as shared world-making.

The deeper lesson is simple and unsettling: a society that organizes indifference toward animals is already practicing the habits it needs to disregard human suffering. Change the habits; change the horizon of the possible.

What We Owe the Futur by William MacAskill - Summary and Review

In What We Owe the Future, philosopher William MacAskill attempts a moral reorientation of historic proportions. His thesis is disarmingly simple but ethically radical: future people matter, there may be an extraordinary number of them, and we can significantly affect the quality of their lives. From this, he argues, flows a powerful imperative—longtermism—the idea that influencing the long-term future should be among our highest priorities.

Longtermism, unpacked

MacAskill builds his case through a blend of thought experiments, historical analogies, and quantitative forecasting. He begins by asking us to imagine living every human life in chronological order—a jarring reminder of just how brief the modern era is relative to human history, and how vast the future could be. If humanity survives even a modest portion of the time Earth remains habitable (let alone if we become an interstellar species), almost all human lives will be lived in the future. The stakes of our decisions today, then, are potentially astronomical.

What follows is a tour through the moral, empirical, and practical scaffolding of longtermist thought. MacAskill addresses obvious challenges: Can we really predict long-term consequences? How can we prioritize distant lives when current suffering remains urgent? His answer is cautious optimism. History offers precedents—slavery abolition, the U.S. Constitution, even Shakespearean poetry—that have had millennia-spanning impacts. Today’s choices, especially around AI, biotechnology, and global governance, may have similarly durable effects.

Trajectory shifts and existential risks

The book distinguishes two primary ways of influencing the future: safeguarding civilization’s survival and steering its trajectory. The former involves minimizing existential risks—events that would cause human extinction or irrevocable collapse, such as engineered pandemics or AI misalignment. The latter, more subtle but perhaps equally consequential, concerns shaping the moral direction of society. If our values become “locked in” by powerful technologies or authoritarian regimes, they may guide billions of lives across millennia.

Here MacAskill is at his most philosophically ambitious, using a "Significance-Persistence-Contingency" framework to assess how our actions might echo across time. He urges a careful, probabilistic mindset—a willingness to act under uncertainty when the stakes are high.

Critical lens and review

While the book is admirably clear and earnest, its framing is not without controversy. Some readers may find the utilitarian undercurrent alienating, especially its speculative arithmetic of lives unborn. Others may argue that the urgency of climate justice, inequality, and political instability today risks being eclipsed by abstract futurism. MacAskill does attempt to address this tension, emphasizing that longtermist goals can (and often do) align with short-term improvements—such as decarbonization, which benefits both current and future generations.

More troubling is the question of epistemic humility. Predicting the values, desires, and dangers of the next million years may be a project as hubristic as it is noble. Yet, MacAskill’s tone is refreshingly open and self-critical. He acknowledges the book as an early attempt to map a vast and uncertain moral terrain.

Final take

Ultimately, What We Owe the Future is less a definitive guide than an invitation to think at planetary and civilizational scale. It challenges readers to stretch their moral imaginations—and their timelines. Whether or not one fully embraces longtermism, MacAskill offers a vital prompt: to see ourselves not just as heirs of history, but as ancestors.

Virtue Ethics - definition and summary

 Central to virtue ethics is the idea that morality is not performing certain right actions but possessing a certain character.  Instead of asking, "What actions are right?" virtue ethics asks, "What kind of persons should we be?"  In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle argued that ethics enables us to live the good life  and that the good life is possible only for virtuous persons.  Aristotle described particular virtues in illuminating detail.  After Aristotle, philosophical theory tended to focus more on right action and duties, but some contemporary philosophers argue for a return to virtue ethics.

What are virtues and how do they determine justice? 

Virtues are specifically those traits that everyone needs for the good life, regardless of their specific situation.  For example, courage is a virtue because it enables anyone to get what he or she wants.  The virtues are integrally related to what Aristotle called practical wisdom, which is what a person needs in order to live well.  Virtue is variously described as an excellence that is admired in a person, as a disposition to act in a certain way, and as a specific state of character.  Lists of the virtues generally include:  benevolence, compassion, courage, courtesy, dependability, friendliness, honesty, loyalty, moderation, self-control, and tolerance.  In developing a list of virtues, we must consider not only the contribution of a virtue to some end but also the end itself.  Aristotle considered happiness to be the end of life, and so the virtues must all contribute in some way to happiness.  Thus, the character traits that enable a despot or a criminal or a lecher to be successful are not virtues because they do not conduce to happiness.  Moreover, the virtues are not merely means to happiness but are themselves constitutive of it.  For example, a parent cannot experience the joy of parenting without actually possessing the traits that make one a good parent. 

Strengths and weaknesses of virtue ethics

  A strength of virtue ethics is that it fits with our everyday moral experience. The response of most people to a complex ethical dilemma is not to think about how universal principles can be applied but to decide what they feel comfortable with or what a person they admire would do.  Codes of professional ethics generally stress that a professional should be a person of integrity.  Unlike the impartiality stressed by utilitarianism and Kantianism, virtue ethics makes better sense of the role that personal relations play in morality.  Since business activity is based so heavily on roles and relationships in which such concepts as loyalty and trust figure prominently, virtue ethics is highly relevant to the workplace.  A weakness of virtue ethics is its incompleteness.  Virtue ethics can take us only so far in dealing with genuine ethical dilemmas.  Some dilemmas involve the limits of rules (such as when concealing information becomes a lie) or conflicts between rules (when telling the truth would harm an innocent person, for example).  Moreover, there are some difficult ethical dilemmas to which virtues do not readily apply.  Some virtue ethicists respond that the importance of dilemmas in ethics has been overstated and that ethics is concerned primarily with the problems of everyday life.  Another weakness is that virtue ethics does not address the problem of conflict.  According to Aristotle, happiness is possible for anyone who becomes a certain kind of person, but insofar as our goals in life include possessing limited goods, not everyone can be successful.  Virtue ethicists respond that morality is more a matter of living cooperatively than of moderating conflict.

See also: Aristotle's virtue ethics

Virtue ethics in business

Nozick’s entitlement theory of Justice - Summary

The philosopher Robert Nozick presents a libertarian statement of the theory of justice that he calls the entitlement theory in the book Anarchy, State and Utopia (1974).  Nozick's principles of justice are historical principles that take into account the process by which a distribution came about rather than the nonhistorical or end-state principles (such as those in utilitarianism and Rawls’s theory) that evaluate a distribution with regard to certain structural features at a given time.  In addition, Nozick's principles of justice are not patterned, inasmuch as patterned principles evaluate a distribution according to the presence or absence of that feature.  Nozick contends that any particular pattern of distribution can be maintained only by continuously interfering in people’s lives and hence violating the right to liberty.  This is the point of the argument about Wilt Chamberlain.

The entitlement theory states that "a distribution is just if everyone is entitled to the holdings they possess."  An expression of the non-patterned entitlement theory in patterned form is, “From each as they choose, to each as they are chosen.”  People are entitled to their holdings if the holdings were obtained by one of the following three principles:

1.  The principle of just transfer.

2.  The principle of just original acquisition.

3.  The principle of rectification.

The original acquisition of a holding is just as long as it does not violate anyone else’s rights.  (Note the discussion in the text of the Lockean Proviso.)  Transfers are just as long as they result from  purely voluntary exchanges, provided that all preceding transfers were just reaching back to a just original acquisition.  However, a principle of rectification is necessary to correct injustices in transfers and original acquisitions.

Justice and free markets according to Nozick

The market system is just because it protects individual rights better than any other economic system.  The point of justice, for Nozick, is to protect rights, not to promote human well-being or to achieve equality, and a largely unregulated free market system, with only the absolute minimum of government intervention, protects rights best.  However, Nozick fails to support his major assumption that liberty, understood as the unhindered exercise of property rights, is a paramount value.  In addition,  not all restrictions of liberty are due to interference by the state; individuals are sometimes restricted by the choices of others.  The conditions for just original acquisitions and just transfers are often absent, and most distributions have been affected at some point in time by forced takings which have never been rectified in accord with the principle of rectification.

Libertarianism, Hayek and the Market System - Summary

Libertarianism is committed to individual liberty conceived as the right to own property and live free from the interference of others.  The free market is justified as the economic system that best supports individual liberty.  Both utilitarianism and libertarianism support a system of free markets, but when the promotion of utility conflicts with the protection of liberty, libertarians favor unregulated markets that protect liberty, while utilitarians prefer regulation in order to increase utility at the expense of liberty.

Hayek and Classical Liberalism. Friedrich von Hayek’s perceptiveness with respect to what is now called classical liberalism and its implications for understanding the market system was significantly underappreciated during the majority of his lifetime.  As a staunch critic of planned economies, particularly those of totalitarian regimes, he advanced a notion of spontaneous order that conceptualizes the free market as far superior to human planning as regards economic and political systems.  It should be noted that Hayek recognized that all human activity requires some order.  However, the two competitors for ordering economic and political system seem to involve greater control and regulation on the one hand and freer rein given to individual liberty on the other.  Within a broad, general set of principles, spontaneous order is the notion that the only goals within a system are those set by individuals rather than those set by either governmental or corporate fiat.  Corporate systems, then, are understood to supervene on aggregates of individual agents exercising free and self-interested choices rather than as basic or foundational to economic and political development.  Hayek called spontaneous order “catallaxy.”  Hayek’s view is consistent with the classical sense of Millian liberalism.  Free exercise of individual liberty will produce greater positive effect within a society than any of the alternatives. 

Summary: John Rawls and The principles of justice

The contemporary American philosopher John Rawls has developed  an egalitarian theory of justice that embodies the Kantian conception of equality and offers an alternative to utilitarianism.  Rawls’s theory focuses on social justice, which he regards as a feature of a well-ordered society.  In such a society, free and equal persons are able to pursue their interests in harmony because of institutions that assign rights and duties and distribute the benefits and burdens of mutual cooperation.  Rawls’s aim is not to develop  the institutions of a well-ordered society but to determine the principles that would be used to evaluate the possibilities.  His method is to ask what principles a rationally self-interested person might agree to if he or she were to choose these principles in an original position behind a veil of ignorance.  The original position is a hypothetical pre-contract situation similar to the state of nature in Locke’s theory.  The veil of  ignorance requires that individuals choose the principles of  justice without knowing any facts about their stations in life, such as social status, natural ability, intelligence, strength, race, and sex.

The principles of justice.  Rawls acknowledges three principles of justice—the principle of equal liberty, the difference principle, and the principle of equal opportunity.

1.  The principle of equal liberty holds that each person has an equal right to the most extensive set of basic liberties that are compatible with a system of liberty for all. 

2.  The difference principle allows an exception to the principle of equal liberty if some unequal arrangement benefits the least well-off person.  That is, an unequal allocation is considered just if the worst-off person is better-off with the new distribution than the worst-off person under any other distribution.

3.  The principle of equal opportunity provides that all public offices and employment positions be made available to everyone.  Society should strive to offer all of its members an equal opportunity to fill positions through the elimination of differences caused by accidents of birth or social condition.  Natural differences should be used for the benefit of all.

The basis for the first principle is that an equal share is the most that any person could reasonably expect considering the requirement for unanimous agreement in the original position.  The second principle recognizes that a rational, impartial person would make an exception to the first principle and accept less than an equal share if everyone would be better off as a result of the inequality.  Rawls’s concern for the least advantaged is due to maximin, which is  a rule of rational choice drawn from game theory in to which it is rational to maximize the minimum outcome when choosing between different alternatives.  However, maximin is not the only rational choice of a person behind the veil of ignorance.  One might use the principle of maximum average utility and assume some risk to increase his or her chances of becoming better-off.  Whether Rawls’s theory of justice is superior to utilitarianism depends, therefore, on the acceptability of maximin as a rule of rational choice.

See also: Rawls - Justice as Fairness

 Rawls / A Theory of  Justice – brief summary

Kant's Categorical Imperative - Summary, Explanation and Review

The fundamental principle of morality in Kantian ethics is the categorical imperative, which is: Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.  Kant explained the categorical principle by means of the moral and nonmoral uses of the word ought.  Used in the nonmoral sense, ought issues in what Kant called hypothetical imperatives that take the form “if you want x, then do y.”  Kant believed that ought used in the moral sense involves categorical imperatives of the form “Do y,” without any reference to empirical conditions, such as desires.  How do we identify these imperatives?  According to Kant, these are rules (or maxims) that a rational person could will everyone to follow, and acts that follow these rules are right.  Immoral acts, by contrast, follow rules that, if followed by everyone, would be self-defeating in some way.  Kant has been called a "closet utilitarian;" however, he does not appeal to the undesirable consequences of a bad maxim but rather to the sheer impossibility of its being followed by everyone.

Many ethicists who reject Kant's categorical imperatives still agree that all moral judgments must be universalizable.  Universalizability can be expressed in two ways.  First, we have to say that an action that is right for one person must be right for all other similar persons in similar circumstances.  This counters a natural temptation to make exceptions for ourselves or to apply double standards.  Second, the principle is the basis of the common question, "What if everyone did that?"  This question refers to hypothetical rather than actual consequences and suggests that if not everyone could perform some act, then that act is wrong.  Universalizability is incapable of refuting fanatics, such as a Nazi who wishes everyone to persecute Jews even if it should be proved that he is a Jew himself.

The second formulation of the categorical imperative is: Act so that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of another, always as an end and never as a means only.  This principle is often expressed as a duty to respect persons. Virtually all ethical systems involve a respect for persons, but the Kantian argument for this duty is distinctive.  Reason, in Kant's view, enables human beings to act freely, to have autonomy, and so to respect other people is to respect their capacity for reason or their autonomy.  The principle of respect for persons does not lend itself to a precise method for decision making.  For example, respect for employees would entail a high degree of job security, but the principle does not tell us how to manage the inevitable trade-offs with such factors as decreased efficiency.  The principle of respect for persons might seem to be superior to utilitarianism in cases where utilitarians are willing to sacrifice the interests of a few in order to increase the welfare of many, but in other cases increased welfare might take precedence over respect for persons.  For example, utilitarianism would generally support paternalistic legislation to protect worker health and safety, whereas the principle of respect for persons would generally allow workers to decide whether they want to be protected.  Arguably, workers ought to be protected by law rather than given a choice.

Theories of Justice: Rawls, Nozick and Walzer - Summary

Distributive Justice

Theories of distributive justice provide moral accounts of how the benefits and burdens of social existence should be distributed amongst the members of a society. Some principles may call for radical redistribution (eg, communism with its egalitarian ethic). Some theories may suggest that people should be given a share of the social product proportionate to their merit, effort or desert (just desert theory). Other theories hold that benefits and burdens should be left where they are distributed by the operation of a market.

John Rawls: A Theory of Justice

John Rawls’ theory of justice as fairness has been the most influential distributive justice theory of the last 50 years (see John Rawls A Theory of Justice). Rawls’ theory is complex but has the following characteristics: -

(i)                 It deals with the way we would organise the laws and institutions of a society, it does not seek to deal with the allocation of each and every possible item.

(ii)               Rawls’ methodology says that a distribution will be just if it is fair and it is fair if it is a distribution we would agree to if we were seeking to establish the principles for distribution within a society (the original position) in circumstances where we had no knowledge of our own characteristics and what would advantage or disadvantage us (the veil of ignorance).

(iii)             Rawls argues that it would be rational if we were in the original position behind a veil of ignorance to agree to a general rule of egalitarianism, with inequality tolerated where it satisfied Rawls’ difference principle.

(iv)             The difference principle allows inequality where it can be shown to be to the benefit of the worst off members of the society.

(v)               Rawls sought to justify his difference principle by appeal to so-called “maximin theory” (ie, ensuring the best possible worst outcome. This is similar to what is sometimes called the “precautionary principle”).

Rawls difference principle is quite stringent. In arguing for it Rawls rejected utilitarianism and its concept of expected average utility. This would permit inequality wherever it could be shown that the inequality would improve overall welfare. Rawls’ arguments for his difference principle are far from convincing and have been much criticised.

Rawls opposed the concept of justice as desert. Many inequalities in our society stem from the differential rewards given to natural talent. Rawls argued that we did not deserve our natural talents and therefore it made no sense to suggest we deserve what those talents can earn. (eg, Pavarotti did not deserve his voice, and therefore cannot deserve the millions that his voice might earn).

Some have argued that Rawls’ theory of justice would produce something akin to the classical welfare State of Australia, Britain or Scandinavia in the 1960’s and 1970’s. Redistributive taxation would be justified by Rawls, subject only to his difference principle. Others have argued that a Rawlsian society would be far more radically redistributive then a classical welfare state, while others have argued that it may in fact involve quite wide disparities justified by the difference principle.

Robert Nozick: Rights and Entitlement Theory

Robert Nozick in his book Anarchy State and Utopia criticised Rawls’ theory on several grounds. Nozick offered his "Entitlement theory" argued that if people have rights and exercise them freely inequalities will occur as the natural result of the exercise of that liberty (Nozick’s Wilt Chamberlain example).

Nozick argued that Rawlsian distributive justice involves constant interference with the exercise of individuals’ liberty and freedom of choice.

Nozick argued that the notion of desert was too stringent. Even if I do no deserve something I may be entitled to it (eg, my health, my relationships with my friend’s family, etc). If I am entitled to my natural talents Nozick argued, then this entails that I may be entitled to the benefits derived from using and exercising my natural talents.

Nozick argued that if people had rights and liberty, justice should not be concerned with the distribution of social benefits and burdens that results from the free exercise by citizens of those rights. Justice theory should concentrate on whether or not people’s rights have been violated.

Nozick argued that a distribution will be just if has come about through conduct that did not involve the violation of people’s rights. In other words, that its history did not involve misappropriation or other violations. Nozick argued against Rawls that justice theory should not be concerned with the end state pattern of distribution provided there has not been misappropriation.

An important criticism of Nozick’s historical entitlement theory is that we are not concerned with founding a society from scratch. Any distribution in any existing society is in part the result of past injustices. It would not appear to be just to apply the historical entitlement principle unless we first sought to correct for the effect of past injustices. The effect of those injustices may be so diffused and tied up with the existing distribution that such correction cannot take place. Any historical entitlement theory must confront the problems and paradoxes of whether it is in fact possible to reverse the effects of past injustices.

Walzer: A Pluralist Justice Theory

Michael Walzer in his work Spheres of Justice argued that there is not one principle of justice applicable to all possible social goods. Walzer argued that the applicable principle will depend upon the nature of what is to be distributed. Political power should ideally be distributed equally.  Professional positions should be distributed on the basis of merit and ability. Some benefits should be distributed in accordance with the outcome of market operations, and others on the basis of need.

Laws and Justice

Within the legal system there appears to be no single principle of justice but several operating at once. Property law appears to reflect a rights base and historical concept of justice. Income tax laws appear concerned with redistribution. Some might view tort law as redistributive, while others might view it as merely restorative of pre-accident distributions.

What type of distributive justice principles appear to justify: -

(a)                Succession law

(b)               Trade practices law

(c)                Anti discrimination law

References

Brown; Alan                Modern Political Philosophy, Penguin, 1986, London

Campbell; Tom                        Justice, McMillan, London, 1988

Wolff; Jonathan;          An Introduction to Political Philosophy, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1996

Nozick; Robert                        Anarchy State and Utopia, Basil, Blackwell, Oxford, 1974

Rawls; John                 A Theory of Justice (revised edition), Cambridge, Harvard, Belknap, 1999.

see also: Rawls / A Theoryof Justice – brief summary