A Theory of Justice

Daniel C. Maguire

To speak of justice is to reach for the foundations of human existence. Justice is not
one virtue among the lot. It is the cornerstone of human togetherness. To survive and
thrive a little we need justice like a body needs blood. To try to define justice is to
address the most profound questions ever to challenge the human mind. The American
approach has been to dodge these questions. Our public philosophy does not contain an
explicit theory of justice. All our laws are, of course, expressions of some concept of
justice, but those laws exist in a matrix of confused and contradictory concepts of justice.
American scholars have not paid their debts to justice theory. This leaves a gaping hole
in the center of our polity.

What I offer here owes many debts to some classical Greek, Hebrew, and
medieval theories of justice. There is richness in these theories to be mined and refined
and so they are a solid foundation for the theory of justice I develop here. The classical
definition begins with deluding simplicity: Justice is the virtue that renders to each
hislher own. "To each his/her own" is the persistent core formula for justice that has
spanned the literature from Homer through Aristotle, Cicero, Ambrose, Augustine, and
Roman law, and it is still seen as the axiomatic core of justice theory. (The Latin for "to
each his/her own" is suum cuique which is neither sexist or clumsy. Our his/her is
linguistically ungraceful but morally imperative since justice is all-inclusive and must not
be defined in sexist terms.) The simplicity and consistency of this definition are
welcomed as a start, but it is only a start. It is like the skin which must then be peeled
away to reveal the layers of reality beneath.

Justice is the first assault upon egoism. Egoism would say: "To me my own."
Justice says, "Wait. There are other selves.” Personal existence is a shared glory. Each
of those other subjects is of great value and commands respect. The ego has a tendency to
declare itself the sun and center of the universe. Justice breaks the news to the ego that
there are no solar gods in the universe of persons. Justice is the attitude of mind that
accepts the others-all others-as subjects in their own right. Justice asserts that one's own
ego is not absolute and that one's interests are related. In the simple concession that each
deserves his/her own, the moral self comes to grips with the reality and value of other
selves. Justice is thus the elementary manifestation of the other-regarding character of
moral and political existence. The alternative to justice is social disintegration because it
would mean a refusal to take others seriously.

But let us peel away another layer. When you say, "To each his/her own," you
face the question "Why?" Why take others seriously? Why not just "to me my own?" To
move from pure egoism to justice is nothing more or less than the discovery of the value
of persons, or, in the common term, the discovery of "the sanctity of life." Justice implies
indebtedness. You owe his/her own to each. But indebtedness is grounded in worth. The
each is worth his/her own. Justice is thus founded upon a perception of the worth of
persons. We show what we think persons are worth by what we ultimately concede is
due to them. Talk of justice would sound like gibberish if we had no perception of the
value of persons.

All of which leads to a jarring conclusion. If we deny persons justice, we have

declared them worthless! Justice, you see, is not the best we can do in reaction to the
value of persons. Friendship is. Aristotle did well to point out that friends have no need
of justice. In friendship a higher, more generous dynamism is operative. You don't tell
newlyweds they owe one another signs of affection in simple justice. Love will take care
of that. Justice, however, is the least we can do for persons. It is the first response to the
value of persons, the least we can do in view of that value. In friendship and in love we
respond lavishly. Justice is concerned with the minimal due. Less than this we could not
do without negating the value of the person. To be perfectly consistent, if we deny justice
to persons we ought to kill them because we have declared them worthless. Their
liquidation would be perfectly in order.

These are grim tidings in the political order. Love does not make the political
world go around; justice is the most we can achieve. Love can flourish at the
interpersonal level, but it would be a mad romantic who said that, at this point in moral
evolution, love can be the energy of the social order. In the political realm, only justice
stands between us and barbarity. In this realm, when justice fails, persons perish. In
different words, justice is incipient love and the only form love takes in political life.

Notice, I started out saying "To each his/her own," with a warning that there is
more to the phrase than meets the eye. This led to the worth of persons as the only reason
why we should acknowledge the other "eaches" and render them at least their minimal
due. Denying that implies they are worthless, and is thus murderous in intent. And this
leads to the next key question: How does need relate to justice?

Most would concede that justice means giving to each what each deserves.
Justice, in other words, is based upon deserts. Here quickly the ways part between
individualists and the defenders of genuine social justice. The individualist would say
that your deserts and entitlements come from your own achievements or as gifts from
other achievers. The theory of social justice concedes this but goes on to say that you
also deserve in accordance with your needs. Needs too give entitlement. The essential
needs of each are also "his/her own." "To each his own" translates into "To each
according to his/her merits and earned entitlements" and "To each according to his/her
needs."

Need gives entitlement because of the worth of the needing person. Needs, of
course, like rights, can conflict with one another. Basic needs issue into rights when their
neglect would effectively deny the human worth of the needy. Or in other words, essential
needs create inalienable fights.
 The final point on need is this: meeting essential needs in society is not a work of
optional charity or benevolence. It is often spoken of this way but this is loose and
dangerous talk. Meeting essential needs does not make one a candidate for sainthood; it
merely establishes one's credentials as human. It is a minimal manifestation of
humanness, the alternative to which is barbarity. If we wish to make it possible for
handicapped people, as far as is financially feasible, to move about in society, this is not
heroic on our part. It is simply a matter of meeting essential needs of persons as best we
can. As soon as we cast this obligation in terms of compassion or charity, we have
declared it supererogatory and therefore dispensable. To neglect it would be ungenerous,
but not morally wrong. When we are speaking about essential needs, such a view is
nonsense. Such a view is also a radical departure from the Judeo-Christian idea of
justice, which is supposedly normative for many Americans. In Hebrew and Christian
thought, meeting essential needs is the soul of justice.

The heart of the matter is that we are not merely individuals we are social
individuals, and there are three fundamental modes of sociality to which the three kinds
of justice correspond. These three are individual justice, social justice, and distributive
justice. These are not three different categories but rather three ways in which the one
category, justice, is realized. Justice does not admit of partitioning. Failure at any form
of justice is injustice. (The Moral Revolution 3-4, 8, 10-11, 12)