Dear Friends,
It seems to me, justice is simply the golden rule, “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” This is the most realistic and clear definition of that mercurial term there can be. Any other definition requires people to do to someone else, that which they would chafe under where it done to them, and thus is not just. It is important to define such a widely used word as justice, because when a speaker claims he or she seeks justice, and ten people are listening, inevitably there are eleven definitions of justice in the conversation. This makes the term a sophist tool to trap people. Everyone has a sense of justice but few have a defined definition that is simple and universal. If we want true justice in our world, then we must agree on a definition, else it means nothing.
People bandy the term justice about constantly, to get the upper hand in an argument or to denigrate this or that action, thought or philosophy, but to do so if the term is not defined, is simply spurious. It is like me saying I will give a car for this or that. Every listener will have a different idea of what type of car I mean, but lacking a definition, no one will know. If I continue claiming I am going to give people a car I can convince people to do real damage to their self interests. Once I have got money, power or property from them for this car, I can give them a plastic toy car and have not overtly lied.
Any definition that is more complex than the golden rule opens itself to injustice. Once we say justice requires calculations and metrics, we have made the word so complex it looses all meaning, and devolves back to a mere tool of sophists. Furthermore, justice cannot mean doing different things to different people. The moment we say it is just to do this to him, and something different to her, we have waded into quicksand. For a thing to be just it must be universally just.
Justice as it applies to property is the golden rule as well. If I pick up a rock and using only my talent and another rock… I carve a figurine, that figurine is mine and no one else’s. To take it violates my right to that which I have made by my own hands, and also steals my liberty in the form of the time it took to make the figurine, because had I known it would be stolen I would not have spent the time to make it. This same logic applies if I have made a thousand figurines, because to take from someone while defending one’s own property, (and everyone defends his or her own property)… violates the golden rule.
Rawls definition of justice comes in two parts and is meant to show how socialism is just. The first part and therefore the foundational part is that any definition of justice must give people the most liberty possible without trampling their rights. The second is that for a person to make an unbiased decision about what economic system is just, they must do it in a, “Veil of ignorance.” This veil is supposed to show that if we don’t know where we will land in this new economic system we will want everything distributed equally.
Nozick’s take on Rawls, is that Rawls believes money and property are like mana from heaven, and that Rawls ignores the very real effort that it takes to get money and property. My take is that Rawls second principle violates his first. If any definition of justice must firstly give maximum liberty and not violate people’s rights, then it is not possible to take from one and give to another. The very act itself makes a slave of one of the parties. Only a twisted mind would argue slavery gives maximum liberty or that it doesn’t violate human rights.
So… justice can be simply defined as the golden rule. Doing something to another, you would not like done to you, no matter the societal good that would be theoretically gained, is fundamentally unjust. The term justice, undefined, can be used for all sorts of pernicious ends, and usually is. Economic justice must also rest on the golden rule, it cannot be given a complex definition, and must be universal, else it is spurious. Over the years, philosophers have tried to twist justice into a reason for injustice, using complex arguments and smart sounding phraseology, but what they propose is not justice but a perversion of justice. It is important for us to understand what justice really is, to stay clear of the pitfalls of sophistry, that brings into the world injustice called justice, always at the point of a gun.
Sincerely,
John Pepin
