Classical Liberalism #8: What elements make up our idea of justice? | David Schmidtz | Big Think

The concept of justice is a concept of what people are do. That I don't think is debatable. I think that is just what people take us to be talking about when we use the word. So there's a lot to argue about, but what we argue about is what people are do.

My own theory is that justice is more than one thing and that the way that we should treat people depends upon the context. The way that we should treat people depends upon who they are, what it is about them that we should be responding to. If we were talking about a daughter, then we would say, "How old is this daughter? Is this daughter 18? Is this daughter four years old?" That has a lot to do with what we owe her.

We might say at a certain age what we owe children is to be responsive to their needs. That's what we aspire to as a civilization: for children to get what they need. And then we might say, well here's the trick. The endpoint of childhood is supposed to be adulthood, and the transition to adulthood from childhood is a transition from a stage where a person's claims are based on their needs to a stage where their claims are based on something else.

So when a child says, "Hey, it's my life," for a while the answer's "No, actually it isn't. It's your—we're in charge of you for now, and our obligation is to be in charge of making sure you have what you need even if that isn't what you want." But at some point we reach a stage in your life where, when you say "It's my life," we have to say, "God help us. We love you, we wish we could protect you from everything in the world, including your own choices, but the fact is you now are an adult. You have your own life to live. In some sense, you're on your own in a way that you weren't on your own when you were a child."

So we have to respect the choices that you make from here because that's the kind of society that we want to live in. We want to live in a society where everyone feels comfortable standing or falling by their own merit. So that's a transition to a different kind of stage in life where the principles aren't need; the principles are different: equality, reciprocity, and dessert—what people mean, meaning what people deserve.

We need to talk then about what the principles of justice are, and we need to talk about why we would believe that it's those principles and not something else that would be at the heart of justice. So we all know that in some sense equality is baked into the concept of justice. There's something about justice which is antithetical to thinking of ourselves as a class society. Thinking that, "Oh, you want to sue me? What you don't understand, I'm upper class; you're lower class. You lose."

It doesn't matter what the substance of your claim is; the fact is you're from the wrong class to be a winner. You're a born loser. That's not what justice is. Justice is somehow the idea that we are going to be citizens involved in a project of building a community, and there isn't anything about what I want that privileges it over what you want. So in that sense, we have to be equals.

And so in that sense, if somebody says, "Everyone has a right to a day in court; everyone has a right to air their grievances before an impartial judge," that sort of thing, everybody has in that sense a status of citizen where no one has an upper class citizenship, no one has a lower class citizenship. You're a citizen of a country, and that puts all of you on a par.

So that kind of equality is baked in. Now, if we said, "Well, you should all have the same income," then I think we would raise some questions. And I would then try to relate those questions to something more fundamental. But first, questions might be, "So wait a minute, if we're all supposed to have the same income and so I have that income at age 18, are we saying that when I hit age 58 I should never have gotten a raise? Is that the idea? Is the idea of equal income meaning we shouldn't have anything to look forward to?"

And you say, "No, that would be crazy! That would not be something that any sane person would want." So that means that we cannot think of that as the kind of equality that's baked into justice.