What’s the subject of justice? pt. 2

[Read part 1]

In my last post, I presented some concerns about the institutional/interactional distinction with regards to the subject of justice and sketched a potentially new way to distinguish between the claims labeled (1) and (2) in that post. Some further thought has led me to be less confident that the worries I presented should lead us to question the adequacy of the institutional/interactional distinction. Nevertheless, I still think there’s at least one reason to shift from an institutional/interactional distinction to a structural/interactional distinction. So this post will attempt two things. First, I’ll sketch out a reason to think that institutions and structures aren’t coextensive (by arguing that institutions are instances of structure). Second, I’ll offer a reason for thinking that the important distinction is between structuralism and interactionism rather than institutionalism and interactionism. (Note: in the last post, I suggested that we ought to dump the institutional/interactional distinction wholesale in favour of a structural/non-structural distinction. For now, I’ve changed my mind; I think we should turn in the institutional/interactional distinction for the structural/interactional distinction.)

What’s the subject of justice? pt. 1

By ’subject of justice’, I mean ‘what claims of justice are about’. So the title question, then, is: what constitutes the content of claims about justice?

Famously, Rawls (1971) answered the question as follows:

The primary subject of the principles of social justice is the basic structure of society, the arrangement of major social institutions into one scheme of cooperation. We have seen that these principles are to govern the assignment of rights and duties in these institutions and they are to determine the appropriate distribution of the benefits and burdens of social life. The principles of justice for institutions must not be confused with the principles which apply to individuals and their actions in particular circumstances. These two kinds of principles apply to different subjects and must be discussed separately. (TJ, sec. 10)

Following Rawls, a distinction has been made in the political philosophy literature between an institutional view and an interactional view. Pogge’s formulation of this distinction in ‘Cosmopolitanism and Sovereignty’ (1992) is representative:

An institutional conception postulates certain fundamental principles of justice. These apply to institutional schemes and are thus second-order principles: standards for assessing the ground rules and practices that regulate human interactions. An interactional conception, by contrast, postulates certain fundamental principles of ethics. These principles, like institutional ground rules, are first-order in that they apply directly to the conduct of persons and groups. (p. 50)

(If you’re interested, two prominent rejections of this distinction are G.A. Cohen, ‘Where the Action Is’ (1995) and L. Murphy, ‘Institutions and the Demands of Justice’ (1998). Pogge, ‘On the Site of Distributive Justice’ (2001) responds. Strictly speaking, Pogge characterizes the interactional view as a view concerning ethics as opposed to justice. But, as I’ll try to make clear below, there could be a way in which both the interactional and institutional views are views of justice.)

To illustrate the distinction, consider the following scenario:

Investing one’s will & ownership claims

I think the following claim (or some version of it) is used by several political theorists (e.g., Locke and Hegel) to justify property rights:

Investment Principle (IP): If A invests its will in some (previously unowned) thing x, A thereby has an ownership claim to x.

For example, if I carve a statue out of a previously unowned rock, I thereby have an ownership claim to that rock/statue. This seems false to me. I’ve recently argued against this principle (with the argument that follows below), but I’m not entirely satisfied with the argument and I can’t put my thumb on the source of my dissatisfaction. First, the argument:

Political Science and Political Theory

[Disclaimer: This turned out to be longer than I originally anticipated, so if it turns out to be too much, my apologies.]

What role should should the deliverances of political science play in theorizing about justice? (Of course, this is just a particular instance of a much more general question, viz., what role should the deliverances of any science play in theorizing about anything? I think the answer to this probably depends upon the domain in which the question is asked; that is, the answer probably differs depending on whether one is talking about, e.g., the role of physics in metaphysical theorizing vs. the role of psychology in ethical theorizing. But I’m not sure about this. In any case, I’ll restrict this post to asking about the role of political science in political theorizing.) It seems to me that the answer to this question depends upon how one intends to use the science.

It seems clear to me that political science shouldn’t play the role of telling us what counts as just, i.e., how things ought to be. Such a use would be clearly encounter Hume’s is-ought problem. So, e.g., if political science shows that democracy reduces income inequality, it doesn’t thereby show that democratic constitutions are just; if it shows that communist regimes never last longer than x number of years, it doesn’t thereby show that communism is unjust. Clearly, for the science to tells us what counts as justice, such statements would have to assume the justice of inequality reduction or that just regimes are enduring; but these conclusions don’t follow from any empirical study.

Another role that political science could play is that of indicating what is possible, thereby enabling us to bring our political theorizing in line with the ‘ought implies can’ principle. I.e., the science constrains what individuals and institutions can be obliged to do by telling us what in fact individuals and insitutions are able to do given their limitations.