Justice

The "Justice: What is the right thing to do?" lectures were my first introduction to concepts of philosophy and various theories of justice. This blog post is a collection of the notes I scribbled while listening to the lectures, one every day. There is no obvious structure to the notes other than what I managed to get after typing everything, the results can be seen on the contents bar. In a nutshell, Michael Sandel explains theories around justice, morality and ethics. In order to do so, he starts with a case study to juxtapose different theories of justice and morality. For example, the Trolley Problem.The question is: What do you do?

Note: The file was originally hosted on GitHub¹

1: Justice with Micheal Sandel

Libertarian View of Government

No paternal legislation (seat belt laws, motorcycle laws etc.). They are human choices and the government has no right to coerce people.
No morals legislation. The State should not try to promote virtues or enact moral legislation.
No redistribution of income from the rich to the poor (soft libertarians approve of slight taxation for judicial system, peace force, etc.)

What makes Income Distribution just

Justice in acquisition (how legally did people make their money?)
Justice in transfer (did the distribution arise from the operation of free consent?). An example is buying and trading on the free market.

Nozick's Argument against Taxation

Taxation = Taking of earnings
Taking of earnings = forced labour (it is essentially the State laying claim to certain hours of a person's life)
Forced labour = slavery (If I don't have the sole right to my labour, it means the State owns part of me)

Violates the fundamental libertarian idea of self-possession

Digression: What would happen if public services like fire engines and ambulances can suddenly be made private and available to only subscribers

Objections to Libertarianism

Poor need money more.
Taxation by consent of the governed is not exactly coercion. This objection means to say by agreeing to be a part of society and electing someone who'll govern them, the rich have already agreed to be taxed.
The successful owe a debt to society. I personally think this makes sense but this responsibility should be felt by the rich and successful, we shouldn't expect everyone to feel this way. There are loads of people who have battled extremely constricting societal trappings to get to where they are and we cannot blame them for feeling they don't owe anything to anyone.
Luck is involved in making money. To make things clear, this objects to the labour argument against taxation.

Underlying premise: Do we really own ourselves in a society?

Connection between labour and property

Every man has a property in his own person. This nobody has any right to but himself.

The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his.

Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature has provided, and left it in, he has mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property.

Right to Private Property

How can there be a right to private property, without consent, before government and legislators arrive on the scene to define property.

There were some interesting arguments about the taking over of Native American land by the European settlers.

State of Nature

The only way to leave the state of nature is by an act of consent where we all agree to give up the enforcement power and to create a government / community where there will be a legislature to make law and where everyone agrees in advance to abide by what the majority decides.

What can the majority decide?

Remember that the majority cannot decide on your life, liberty and property. So, there's a dilemma here. On one hand, we'd like the problem of property rights to be resolved but on the other hand, we all know that the majority cannot decide on the life, liberty and property of individuals as it would mean undermine the inherent principle of self-possession.

Property is natural in one sense but conventional in another, it's natural in the sense that we have a fundamental unalienable right, that the institution of property exist and be respected by the government. But what counts as taking up property is defined by the government.

What's the Right Thing To Do?

According to Immanual Kant, when we, like animals, seek pleasure or the satisfaction of desires or the avoidance of pain, we aren't really acting freely, we're acting as the slaves of those appetites. Personally, I couldn't agree more. Freedom is not choosing Twitter and McDonalds over Instagram and KFC, it is not needing to choose any of them at all.

Freedom is the opposite of necessity

Kant's Conception of Freedom

To act freely = to act autonomously = act according to a law I give myself.
To act freely is not to choose the best means to a given end, it's to choose the end itself for it's own sake.

Kant's Conception of Morality

Moral worth of an action depends on motive.

What is the supreme principle of morality

Duty vs. Inclination
Autonomy vs. Heteronomy
Categorical Imperative vs. Hypothetical Imperative

The Categorical Imperative

The Formula of Universal Law

Act only on that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.

Note: this is just a test, but not a reason onto itself which would contradict Kant.

The Formula of Humanity as an End

I say that man, and in general, every rational being, exists as an end in himself, not merely as a means for arbitrary use by this or that will.

Moral Force of Actual Contracts

How do they bind or obligate?
How do they justify the terms they produce? They don't, for example, the United States constitution had once agreed to slavery.

Rawls says that the way to think about justice is from the standpoint of a hypothetical contract behind a veil of ignorance that creates a condition of equality by ruling out or enabling us to forget for the moment, the differences in power and knowledge that could, even in principle, lead to unfair results.

Theories of Distributive Justice

Belief System	Justice Theory
Libertarian	Free Market System
Meritocracy	Fair Equality of Opportunity
Egalitarian	Rawls' Difference Principle

Rawls' Difference Principle

Rawls does not say that the only way to remedy / compensate for differences in natural talents and abilities is to have a kind of leveling equality (a guaranteed equality of outcome) but people may gain/benefit from their good fortune, only on terms that work to the advantage of the least well-off.

Objections to Rawls' Difference Principle

What about incentives? (If taxes go up to 70%, 80%, why would people be motivated to earn money?)

Rawls has an answer to this objective, he says that the rich are to gain, but not too much as to make everyone lose the motivation needed. In effect, keep the tax rate optimal.

The naturally advantaged are not to gain merely because they are more gifted, but only to cover the costs of training and education and for using their endowments in ways that help the less fortunate as well. ~ John Rawls

What about effort?
What about self-ownership?

Life isn't fair. It is tempting to believe that the government can rectify what nature has spawned. ~ Milton Friedman

The natural distribution is neither just nor unjust; nor is it unjust that persons are born into society at some particular position. These are simply natural facts. What is just and unjust is the way that our institutions deal with these facts. ~ John Rawls

Arguments FOR affirmative action

Corrective : For differences in educational backgrounds
Compensatory : For past wrongs (until when though?)
Diversity : For educational experience and for society as a whole.

Is it possible and is it desirable to detach questions of distributive justice from questions of moral desert and questions of virtue

Aristotle's Views

Extremely interesting and thought-provoking in my opinion

Justice involves two factors: things and the persons to whom the things are assigned. In general, we say that persons who are equal should have equal things assigned to them. ~ Aristotle

To whom should the best tennis courts in the university go to? To the best players or everyone on a turn basis / first-come-first-serve basis

Aristotle took distributive justice to be mainly not about income and wealth but about offices and honours. Who should have the right to rule? Who should be a citizen?

Aristotle says that it is the nature of man to live in a polis (politics) as it is only there that we use our faculty of language to the fullest to debate right and wrong.

A man, who is isolated, who is unable to share in the benefits of political association , or who has no need to share, because he's already self-sufficient, such a person must be either a beast or a God. ~ Aristotle

He says that part of the point of politics is to honour people like Pericles, it isn't just that Pericles should have the dominant say because he has the best judgement and that will lead to the best outcomes, to the best consequences to the citizens. That is true, and it is important, but a further reason people like Pericles should have the greatest measure of offices and honours and political authority and sway in the polis is that the point of politics is to single out and honour those who possess the relevant virtue.

Objection to Aristotle's Teleological Sense of Justice

If certain roles are fitting/appropriate to me, where does that leave my right to choose my social roles, my life purposes for myself?

What room does teleology leave from freedom?

Views of Obligation

Man is essentially a story-telling animal. That means I can only answer the question 'What am I to do?' if I can answer the question of 'what story/stories do I find myself a part [of]?. ~ Alastair MacIntyre

I'm never able to seek for the good / exercise the virtues only qua (as) individuals ...we all approach our own circumstances as bearers of a particular social identity. I am someone's son/daughter, a citizen of this/that city. I belong to this clan, that tribe, this nation.

These constitute the given of my life, my moral starting point. This is, in part, what gives my life its moral particularity