Abstract
The main objective of justice is to guarantee that people can take part in decision-making processes. To reach this end it is necessary to ensure that people develop the capabilities necessary to offer and accept arguments, to recognize the best argument, to express dissent, to recognize a reasonable agreement or a reasonable disagreement and so on. For a person to acquire her condition of a subject of dialogue — which is specified in reciprocal recognition autonomy and requires ensuring the practical relations-to-self of self-trust, self-respect and self-esteem -the measures required by justice will be the ones that are traditionally associated with social justice and with recognition. In order to do that, normative criteria and principles are needed that state how to enhance elementary capabilities and distribute the required means. These principles and normative criteria are much more than distributive principles; they are intended to ensure agents of justice. I have already mentioned how blunt the so-called paradigm of distribution is, because it is almost impossible to subsume under the category of distribution the social bases of self-respect or the concept of capability, for instance. I argue that the ‘displacing of the distributive paradigm’, as Young exemplarily claimed, has taken place through the ascent of the concept of capability, which has sprung from discussions within that paradigm.1
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Young recognizes the role of the capability approach in decentring justice from distributive issues; see I. M. Young (2000), Inclusion and Democracy (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press), p. 32.
A similar argument is presented by Simmons. See J. Simmons (2010), ‘Ideal and Nonideal Theory’, Philosophy & Public Affairs, 38 (1), 5–36, 34–35.
A clear criticism of Sen’s interpretation of Rawls’s theory is addressed by Valentini. See L. Valentini (2011), ‘A Paradigm Shift in Theorizing about Justice? A Critique of Sen’, Economics and Philosophy, 27 (3), 297–315, 303ff.
This possibility of the transcendental and comparative approach working in conjunction is also present in Dworkin’s work, in which he introduces in a first instance an ideal model of justice and then, when he needs to translate that ideal model into the real world, recognizes a set of possible eligible situations according to that ideal criterion. Dworkin refers to these different alternatives as ‘defensible egalitarian situations’. See R. Dworkin (2000), ‘The Place of Liberty’, in Sovereign Virtue, pp. 120–183, 169–172.
See R. Dworkin (1996), ‘Objectivity and Truth: You’d Better Believe It’, Philosophy & Public Affairs, 25 (2), 87–139, 129–137.
David Miller has reformulated Michael Walzer’s original concern with these kinds of principles and normative criteria by focusing primarily on interpersonal relations instead of goods. Jon Elster also offers an exhaustive and very accurate account of this problem. See M. Walzer, Spheres of Justice, chapter 1; Miller, Principles of Social Justice, pp. 25–32; J. Elster (1993), Local Justice: How Institutions Allocate Scarce Goods and Necessary Burdens (New York: Russell Sage Foundation), chapter 3.
See A. Honneth (2010), ‘Das Gewebe der Gerechtigkeit’, in Das Ich im Wir: Studien zur Anerkennungstheorie (Berlin: Suhrkamp), pp. 51–77.
Sen has rejected the possibility of building a list of capabilities; his main argument is that a list would lose sensitivity to inter-communitarian variations. Nussbaum’s response is that a list of capabilities is not a list of functionings; thus, it is possible to present a universal list of capabilities locally specified in different orderings of functionings. See A. Sen (1993), ‘Capability and Well-Being’, in Sen and Nussbaum (eds), The Quality of Life, pp. 30–53, 43; Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, pp. 87–90. Many other social scientists recognize the usefulness of lists for intervening in social reality; some of them are S. Alkire (2002), ‘Dimensions of Human Development’, World Development, 30 (2), pp. 181–205;
D. Crocker (1998), ‘Consumption, Well-Being and Capability’, in D. Crocker and T. Linden (eds), Ethics of Consumption: The Good Life, Justice and Global Stewardship (New York: Rowman & Littlefield), pp. 336–390;
D. Narayan et al. (2000), Voices of the Poor: Can Anyone Hear Us? (New York: Oxford University Press for the World Bank);
R. A. Cummins (1996), ‘Domains of Life Satisfaction: An Attempt to Order Chaos’, Social Indicators Research, 38 (3), 303–328;
M. Ramsay (1992), Human Needs and the Market (Aldershot: Avebury);
L. Doyal and I. Cough (1991), A Theory of Human Need (Basingstoke: Macmillan);
M. Max-Neef (1993), Human Scale Development: Conception, Application and Further Reflections (London: Apex Press).
See H. Frankfurt (1987), ‘Equality as a Moral Ideal’, Ethics, 98 (1), pp. 21–43, 37–40;
R. Crisp (2003), ‘Equality, Priority, and Compassion’, Ethics, 113 (4), 745–763, 762.
The weakness of the justification of the sufficientarians’ thresholds has been clearly stated by Paula Casal. See P. Casal (2007), ‘Why Sufficiency Is Not Enough’, Ethics, 117 (2), 296–327, 312–314. My normative justification of the threshold intends to be stronger than those.
Christian Schemmel has clearly pointed out the effects of distributive policies on intersubjective relations. See C. Schemmel (2011), ‘Why Relational Egalitarians Should Care about Distributions’, Social Theory and Practice, 37 (3), 365–390, 381–384.
Rawls establishes, as a limitation for the differences allowed by the difference principle, that those differences should never undermine the self-respect of the least advantaged. Scanlon accurately reconstructs this argument. See Rawls, Theory of Justice, 468–469, T. M. Scanlon (1975), ‘Rawls’ Theory of Justice’, in N. Daniels (ed.), Reading Rawls. Critical Studies on Rawls’ ‘A Theory of Justice’ (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press), pp. 169–206, 200.
See G. Pereira (2004), Medios, capacidades y justicia distributiva (México: UNAM); (2006), ‘Means and Capabilities in the Discussion of Distributive Justice’, Ratio Juris, 19 (1), 55–79.
I believe that a critique of property should be considered an element of a critical theory of justice. Volker Heins has proposed some normative guidelines to develop such a critique. See V. Heins (2009), ‘The Place of Property in the Politics of Recognition’, Constellations, 16 (4), 579–592. It must be said that this concern is also raised by Rawls, who affirms that the kind of social regime that is compatible with his conception of justice sketches a clear alternative to capitalism such as a property-owning democracy and liberal (democratic) socialism. See Rawls, Justice as Fairness, §41. A critical theory of justice is closer to a liberal socialism.
My criticism does not diminish the positive impact on the reduction of inequality that some proposals such as Roemer’s socialist market or Ackerman and Alsttot’s stakeholder society can have, but it is based on their weakness in confronting the core of the dynamics of capitalism. See J. Roemer (1994), A Future for Socialism (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press);
B. Ackerman and A. Alsttot (1999), The Stakeholder Society (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press). I find Wright’s more comprehensive strategy is better equipped to deal with the pathological effects of market.
See E. O. Wright (2010), Envisioning Real Utopias (London: Verso).
Some of them are G. A. Cohen, ‘On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice’; Arneson ‘Equality and Equal Opportunity for Welfare’; J. Romer (1996), Theories of Distributive Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).
See Dworkin, ‘Equality of Resources’, pp. 83ff; ‘Justice and the High Cost of Health’, pp. 315–316. Dworkin’s last position about this topic remains unchanged; as regards someone’s capacities to be rational and decide in a free and deliberate way, he continues assuming a self-sufficient subject. See R. Dworkin (2011), Justice for Hedhogs (Cambrdige, MA and London, Harvard University Press), pp. 223–225, 358–359.
See G. Pereira (2007), ‘Preferencias adaptativas: un desafío para el diseño de las políticas sociales’, Isegoría, 36, 143–165.
For a very comprehensive and exhaustive criticism of the so-called luck egalitarianism and its normative usage of the concept of responsibility, see S. Hurley (2003), Justice, Luck, and Knowledge (Cambridge, MA, and London: Cambridge University Press), chapters 5 and 6.
Hurley (2003), Justice, Luck, and Knowledge (Cambridge, MA, and London: Cambridge University Press), chapters 5 and 6.
See J. Rawls (1980), ‘Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory: The Dewey Lectures 1980’, Journal of Philosophy, 77 (9), 515–572, 545;
Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference, p. 25; (2011), Responsibility for Justice (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press), p. 33.
About this point Scanlon affirms: ‘The fact that a choice was voluntary does not always establish that we “did enough” for an agent by placing him or her in the position from which the choice was made.’ Scanlon, ‘The Significance of Choice’, p. 196; he also maintains that ‘one important virtue of the Value of Choice account is that it allows the various conditions under which a choice is (or could be) made to be taken into account separately from the fact of choice itself, and to be given the independent significance appropriate to them.’ T. M Scanlon (1988), What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge, MA, and London: Belknap Press / Harvard University Press), p. 261.
An empirical case can illustrate this: the World Bank has adopted the responsibility-centred Roemer’s equality of opportunity to evaluate social situations and fight against poverty and inequality. None of the evaluations made or the normative guides proposed are more precise than the conclusions that practitioners embedded in social problems can reach. In this case a very sophisticated tool is as useful as the common sense of experienced practitioners. See R. Paes de Barros, F. Ferreira, J. Vega and J. Saavedra (2009), Measuring Inequality of Opportunities in Latin America and the Caribbean (Houndmills, Basingstoke and New York: World Bank and Palgrave Macmillan).
See L. Murphy and T Nagel (2002), The Myth of Ownership: Taxes and Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press);
S. Scheffler (2001), ‘Responsibility, Reactive Attitudes, and Liberalism in Philosophy and Polities’, in Boundaries and Allegiances: Problems of Justice and Responsibility in Liberal Thought (New York: Oxford University Press), pp. 12–30.
See K.-O. Apel (1993), ‘Diskursethik als Ethik der Mitverantwortung für kollektive Aktivitäten’, in M. Grossheim and H.-J. Waschkies (eds), Rehabilitierung des Subjektiven. Festschrift für Hermann Schmitz (Bonn: Bouvier), pp. 191–207, 197.
It is quite controversial whether corporate responsibility can be distributed amongst individual members of the corporation. See P. Pettit (2007), ‘Responsibility Incorporated’, Ethics, 117 (2), 171–211;
D. Copp (2007), ‘The Collective Moral Responsibility Thesis’, Journal of Social Philosophy, 38 (3), 369–388;
F. Hindriks (2009), ‘Moral Responsibility and Judgment Aggregation’, Economics and Philosophy, 25 (2), 161–177.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2013 Gustavo Pereira
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Pereira, G. (2013). Principles and Scope of Justice. In: Elements of a Critical Theory of Justice. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137263384_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137263384_7
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-44255-3
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-26338-4
eBook Packages: Palgrave Religion & Philosophy CollectionPhilosophy and Religion (R0)