Justice from Plato to Rawls
(Source: Ethics Matter, University of San Diego)
What is justice? This is a long-debated question by philosophers and jurists and political leaders,
and our consideration of justice will begin with a brief consideration of one of the earliest
philosophical texts about justice: Plato’s Republic. After that we will look at one of the most
recent theories of justice, but one that is extraordinarily powerful: John Rawls’ account in A
Theory of Justice (1972).
A. Plato’s Account of Justice
Plato’s Republic is one of the classics of Western philosophy, and it constitutes a long meditation
on the nature of justice. Over the course of its ten books, it describes the ideal state, and that itself
is the embodiment of justice. For Plato, justice is an unavoidably social and political concept, so a
meditation on the nature of justice naturally becomes a meditation on the ideal society and state.
The Athenian Conception of Justice: Justice as Honesty in Word and Deed
In Book One of The Republic, we see Plato survey several different and conflicting conceptions of
justice. It is helpful to look at these, because they provide a set of models for everyday conceptions
of justice in our own times. The conversation begins with Cephalus, an elder statesman in Athens
and widely recognized as a just man, talking with Socrates, who has asked him what the greatest
benefit of his wealth has been. Cephalus replies that, as he gets older, he thinks more about what
will happen after death and gains hope from the knowledge that he has lived in justice and piety.
This prompts Socrates to ask Cephalus what justice is, Cephalus replies that justice comes down to
being truthful and paying your debts.
As will occur throughout The Republic, Socrates poses objections to the definition of justice.
Imagine, Socrates says, that someone has stored his weapons with you. Later, the friend comes
back “not in his right mind” and asks you to return the weapons to him. No one would fault us,
Socrates says, from refusing to give the weapons back. But if this is so, “then speaking the truth
and paying your debts is not a correct definition of justice.”
The Conventional View of Justice: Helping Friends and Harming Enemies
Cephalus gives up on defining justice, and turns the conversation over to Polemarchus, his son.
Polemarchus states the conventional view of justice, namely, that justice consists in helping your
friends and harming your enemies. In dealing with your enemies, your should return evil for evil,
according to Polemarchus. This definition, Socrates suggests, might be useful in war, but it offers
us little guidance in times of peace. Socrates then proceeds to twist Polemarchus’ ideas around to
the point that Polemarchus seems to be saying that the just person is best at being unjust.
The Cynical View of Justice: Might Makes Right
The next definition of justice considered by Socrates is advanced by Thrasymachus, who
maintains that “justice is nothing else than the interest of the stronger.” The only thing that makes
any difference, this view of justice asserts, is power, and justice is whatever the powerful declare it
to be.
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There is obviously a certain amount of realism in this view: justice is rarely achieved without the
support of the power structure, but it is only the cynic who agrees with Thrasymachus that justice
is only the interest of the stronger. If that were the case, there never would be justification for
criticizing the state for acting unjustly.
Plato’s View of Justice
It would be simple if Socrates then went on to tell us what justice really is, but this is not the way
Socrates (and Plato) taught. Rather, we have to look at the entirety of The Republic to see what
Plato really meant by justice, and even that is the source of much disagreement among scholars.
Here I will offer simply one view of what Plato may have meant by justice.
Justice in The Republic is harmony, both internal and external. Internal harmony is a proper
balance in the soul, and external harmony manifests itself in the state. The virtuous individual
possesses inner harmony, a balance among the faculties of the soul. In order to live a good life, the
virtuous individual must live in a just society. Thus inner and outer justice need one another:
without just individuals, a just society is impossible; without a just society, the life of the just
individual may not be a happy one.
B. Distributive Justice: John Rawls
John Rawls has had a profound impact on contemporary moral and political philosophy. His most
important work, A Theory of Justice, was first published in 1971. After its publication, it
established the conceptual landscape within which discussions of justice were to occur, at least in
the English-speaking literature. You could agree with Rawls or you could disagree with him, but
you couldn’t ignore him.
Rawls’ Moral Concerns
Rawls was acutely aware of the extent to which that luck was not deserved — it was simply luck.
Throughout his work, Rawls remains highly sensitive to this issue of luck, and his goal is to create
a society in which luck plays a minimal role in the rules that govern that society. Out of this comes
Rawls’ deep egalitarianism, his desire to see everyone treated as fairly as possible. A Theory of
Justice provides an account of what is involved in such fair treatment.
The Original Position: A Thought Experiment
Imagine you are put in the following situation. You are one of a group of people who have been
assigned the task of devising the basic rules that will govern society and the interactions of
individuals in society. Your job is to work with the other people in the group to devise this set of
principles. Furthermore, you are representing someone else in doing this, as are all the other
delegates. You are to act rationally, and all of you are to act in the best interests of the people you
represent. There is just one catch: you are behind what Rawls calls the “veil of ignorance.”
The Social Contract
Up until Rawls introduces the notion of the veil of ignorance, his account forms a standard
hypothetical contractarian approach, that is, he sees the foundation of morality in some kind of
social contract, usually implicit rather than an actual contract agreed upon at some historical time.
Perhaps the most well-known representative of this approach to social theory was Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, whose book The Social Contract (1762) continues to be studied today.
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The Veil of Ignorance
Rawls’ distinctive addition to the concept of the social contract was to ask the participants to
imagine that they do not know any particulars about the person each of them was to represent.
Thus, as a representative in the original position, I would be committed to acting rationally on
behalf of the person I represent and to seeking to devised the best possible rules for that position.
But since I am behind the veil of ignorance, I do not know anything in particular about the person I
am representing. Is the person male or female, young or old, rich or poor. In what areas is the
person talented: the arts, science, sports, human relations? In what country does the person live?
It is easy to see the Kantian dimension present in this notion of the veil of ignorance. Kant asks us
to set aside our moral individuality and ask what any rational agent ought to do in a given situation.
(This is the force of Kant’s imperative that we ought to be able to will the maxim of our actions for
all rational beings.) By denying us knowledge of the specifics of our situation, and by asking us to
represent in a rational and prudential way the best interests of that person concealed behind the
veil of ignorance, Rawls forces us into a kind of neutrality that has a clearly Kantian flavor.
Although we are self-interested in this context, we don’t have any specific knowledge of the
particular self that would allow us to be partisan in standard ways. Deliberation in the original
position behind the veil of ignorance should insure that no one’s interests are short-changed.
We can also see the way in which Rawls’ veil of ignorance helps to even out some of the effects,
both positive and negative, of mere luck. We do not know whether or not we have been lucky
enough to be very intelligent, to be very athletic, to be very gregarious, to be very rich, to be part
of the ruling elite. The veil of ignorance flattens out some of those quirks of fate, and in so doing
provides a more level playing field for the moral life.
Rawls’ Principles
Deliberating behind the veil of ignorance in the original position, what principles will we adopt for
our society according to Rawls? He maintains that we would reach agreement on two basic
principles, one regarding basic rights and liberties and the other regarding the distribution of social
and economic inequalities.
Basic Rights. In A Theory of Justice, Rawls maintains that “Each person has an equal claim to a
fully adequate scheme of equal basic rights and liberties, which scheme is compatible with the
same scheme for all; and in this scheme the equal political liberties, and only those liberties, are to
be guaranteed their fair value.”
The Difference Principle. “Social and economic inequalities are to satisfy two conditions:
(a) they are to be attached to positions and offices open to all under conditions of fair equality of
opportunity; and
(b) they are to be to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged members of society
These two principles form the core of Rawls’ position, and they can both be seen as principles of
distributive justice. The first principle, the basic rights principle, establishes how we should
distribute liberties. Part (a) of the difference principle establishes how we should distribute
opportunities. These two principles are indexical, that is, if there is a conflict, principle 1 overrides
principle 2, and (a) overrides (b). Let’s look at some examples to see what Rawls means by these
principles.
Consider the Difference Principle, part (a). (This example will be more concrete than Rawls would
give, but it illustrates the point quite well.) We have laws regulating driving regarding speeding,
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stop lights, etc. If two people were speeding, and the police let one go because the speeder was the
child of the chief of police, we would consider that unjust. If, however, the police did not stop a
speeding ambulance because it was rushing someone to the hospital, that would not offend our
Rawlsian sense of justice. The exception would be based on the position or office (ambulance
driver), which is open to all, whereas this is not the case with the child of the chief of police.
The Difference Principle, part (b) might be used to justify attempts to level the playing field after
inequalities due to racial discrimination. We might, for example, treat people differently because
they had been severely deprived due to racial bigotry. Such differential treatment might involve
additional tutoring, more active recruitment, and the like. The underlying justification of this, In
Rawls’ eyes, is that these are the least advantaged members of society and differential treatment is
justified in order to narrow the gap between the least advantaged and the majority of society.
On the other hand, this principle would not justify large tax exemptions for the wealthy, precisely
because this would not benefit the least advantaged but rather the most advantaged.
C. Criminal Justice
We have been examining competing approaches to justice in the preceding sections, but there is
another issue of justice that those discussions often neglect: the justice that we seek when someone
has broken the law, has committed a crime.
Retributive Justice
The dominant justification of punishment in the United States appears to be the appeal to
retributive justice. At its core, the notion of retributive justice usually depends on some version of
the lex talionis, the law of “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.” This is retributive justice: if
someone has hurt me, that person will be hurt in return in the same way. Often, this notion of
retributive justice is used to justify the death penalty: an eye for an eye, a death for a death.
Despite the fact that the lex talionis has some initial plausibility in a small range of cases, we in
fact can see that there are many cases where this literal interpretation of the lex talionis makes no
sense at all. How, for example, are we to punish those who hijack airplanes? We can’t very well
hijack their planes, since they do not have any. What about arsonists? Do we set their homes on
fire? Or rapists? Do we rape them in return? Or burglars? Do we steal their money and possessions
when they are asleep?
While some would probably advocate those extreme responses, most of us would admit that the
literal interpretation of the lex talionis is insufficient for two reasons. First, there are many types of
crimes for which it makes no sense that we would try to do the same thing to the perpetrator. The
more plausible interpretation of this principle is a metaphorical one that says something like this:
the more serious the crime, the more serious the punishment.
But even this will not suffice. We need to recognize that, in the most serious of cases, we may
restrain ourselves from extreme punishment because the act of punishing diminishes us. Take rape
as an example. To rape a rapist as punishment would be to demean ourselves, the punishers. So,
too, we do not torture the sadistic murderer, even though on the basis of some principle of
proportionally we believe the murderer deserves to suffer as much as his victims. Again, we
restrain ourselves because we would be debasing ourselves to carry out the punishment.
Interestingly, recognizing these two limitations on the lex talionis helps us to find a middle ground
in regard to the death penalty. Proponents of the death penalty, if one accepts this principle, are
justified in claiming that certain criminals have done such horrendous things that they deserve to
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die. Opponents of the death penalty can admit this, while at the same time arguing that, even if
some criminals deserve to die, we do not deserve to kill them. The issue is the effect of the
punishment on the punishers.
Those who hold a strictly retributivist account of justice are open to some objections. How should
we treat the person who has done something horrible in his youth, subsequently led an exemplary
life, and then in old age is apprehended for that crime committed long ago? Retributivists are
committed to saying that the magnitude of the crime remains the same, whether committed
yesterday or fifty years ago. Other, more forward-looking accounts of punishment would be less
likely to punish to the full measure of the law.
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