ABSTRACT
An old Chinese parable tells us of the recruitment of a country magistrate and of a military officer in the province of Nanyang. On both occasions, the wise old Qi Huangyang was consulted. As for the first vacancy, he advised that Xie Hu be given the post, for although Xie happened to be his personal enemy, Xie was undoubtedly, according to Qi, the best qualified candidate. As for the second post, Qi recommended that it be given to his son, Qi Wu. When eyebrows were raised about the appropriateness of this advice, given the tie of consanguinity between old Qi and the candidate, the former replied: ‘You asked me who would be suitable for the post, not who my son was.’ Upon hearing this story, Confucius is said to have remarked: ‘Qi Huangyang’s judgement is commendable indeed. When recommending one outside his family, he did not discriminate against his enemy. When recommending a member of his family, he had no scruples about choosing his own son. This is indeed a just and impartial man.’ This last comment by Confucius, as well as similar statements that an
ordinary person would be tempted to make about King Solomon having been a ‘just arbitrator’ in the affairs of his subjects, for instance, or a particular teacher having been ‘ever so just’ in all dealings with his students, might sound somewhat archaic to the average contemporary philosopher – if less so, perhaps, to a layperson. The tide of mainstream philosophy turned against the notion of justice as a personal virtue some time ago, with such a notion being considered at best irrelevant and old-fashioned, at worst incoherent and confusing. While the standard formal textbook definition of justice as ‘a state of affairs in which just decisions are taken’ does not, by itself, undermine the commonplace idea that justice is a virtue and an important one at that, modern philosophers have tended to view justice solely as a virtue of social institutions, and thus as relating to institutional decisions and public policy, rather than as a virtue of individual persons and their decision-making. What brought about this erosion of the deeply ingrained conviction of most pre-modern philosophers that justice is, first and foremost, a virtue pertaining to a person’s reactions and actions? Why has Aristotle’s general conception of justice, for example, seemed to many to be of such dubious modern appositeness, namely his conception of justice as primarily a character trait (hexis) of individuals, while only derivatively of institutions, and, conversely, of injustice as, at bottom, a result of
intrapersonal rather than interpersonal misorientation (see, for example, O’Connor, 1988, pp. 417-37)? At least three explanations quickly suggest themselves. First, there is a strong intuition that the virtue of justice is, by its very
nature, more ‘social’ than most of the other virtues. One can easily fail to hit the ‘golden mean’ of a typical moral virtue such as temperance in private: through, for instance, gluttony (qua excess) or inappropriate indifference towards food (qua deficiency). It is, by contrast, difficult to imagine Robinson Crusoe doing anything that could be called just or unjust on his desert island before Man Friday came along. If one is to be properly called just or unjust, it must be with regard to other persons, not to oneself, let alone to inanimate objects or even animals. As Aristotle himself insisted, ‘what is just or unjust must always involve more than one person’ (1985, pp. 145-6 [1138a]). What this intuition shows, however, is only that justice (and perhaps some other related virtues) needs a social context for its actualization; it does not show that justice cannot, primarily, be the virtue of an individual person. Second, justice talk may, at first, seem more appropriate to issues relating
to large-scale social interaction and public policy than to the small-scale family affairs and personal relationships where many of our moral virtues are typically played out. Would it not be odd to say that a husband acts justly towards his wife and children, in addition to simply acting well, or correctly, towards them? This semblance of oddness may, however, be illusory. For instance, the compound emotion of jealousy, so common in close personal relationships, requires, as I have already noted, the justice-based emotion of righteous indignation as one of its ingredients. If the eight-year-old Betsy feels bothered because her teacher chose only Kate’s poster to hang in the hall at the school fair, we cannot describe Betsy’s emotion as one of jealousy, as distinguished from, for example, invidious envy, unless we add to Betsy’s belief the indignation-grounding conviction that she deserved to be favoured more than, or at least as much as, Kate (Kristja´nsson, 2002, ch. 5). Or, to take a less complex and controversial example, justice issues of the most prototypical distributive kind are involved in many family conflicts, for example those having to do with the extent to which different siblings should get involved in the care of an ageing, non-institutionalized parent (for a vivid personal example, see Lerner, 2002, pp. 23-5). So it does make perfect sense to talk about justice or lack of justice in small-scale personal interactions. Third, and perhaps most important historically, the notion of justice as a
personal virtue has not fared well within the theoretical province of liberalism, the theory that dominated, for many years at least, modern discussions of the moral and political salience of justice. Liberals fear that consideration of justice as a personal virtue inexorably entails the notion of more or less ‘deserving’ individuals, getting or not getting ‘their due’, in justice talk, and this they find unacceptable. The reasons behind the liberal antipathy to desert are well known and need only be rehearsed briefly here. They can be summarized in three theses.
