ABSTRACT
At last this work can appear in the form it was intended to take when I started on it nearly twenty years ago. Half way through this period, when a first draft was nearly completed, a weakening of my powers, which fortunately proved to be temporary, made me doubt whether I should ever be able to complete it and led me to publish in 1973 a fully completed part of what were to become three separate volumes. When a year later I found my powers returning I discovered that various circumstances made substantial revisions necessary of even those further parts of the draft which I had thought to be in [a 2 ] fairly finished state. As I explained in the preface to the second volume, which appeared in 1976, the chief reason was my dissatisfaction with that central chapter which gave that volume its sub-title The Mirage of Social Justice. This account I had better repeat here:
I had devoted to this subject an enormous chapter in which I had tried to show for a large number of instances that what was claimed as demanded by ‘social justice’ could not be justice because the underlying consideration (one could hardly call it a principle) was not capable of general application. The point I was then mainly anxious to demonstrate was that people would never be able to agree on what ‘social justice’ required, and that any attempt to determine remunerations according to what it was thought was demanded by justice would make the market unworkable. I have now become convinced, however, that the people who habitually employ the phrase simply do not know themselves what they mean by it and just use it as an assertion that a claim is justified without giving a reason for it.
In my earlier efforts to criticize the concept I had all the time the feeling that I was hitting into a void and I finally attempted, what in such cases one 4ought to do in the first instance, to construct as good a case in support of the ideal of ‘social justice’ as was in my power. It was only then that I perceived that the Emperor had no clothes on, that is, that the term ‘social justice’ was entirely empty and meaningless. 3 [Just like 4 ] the boy in Hans Christian Andersen’s story, 5 I ‘could not see anything, because there was nothing to be seen’. The more I tried to give it a definite meaning the more it fell apart – the intuitive feeling of indignation which we undeniably often experience in particular instances proved incapable of being justified by a general rule such as the conception of justice demands. But to demonstrate that a universally used expression which to many people embodies a quasi-religious belief has no content whatever and serves merely to insinuate that we ought to consent to a demand of some particular group is much more difficult than to show that a conception is wrong.
In these circumstances I could not content myself to show that particular attempts to achieve ‘social justice’ would not work, but had to explain that the phrase meant nothing at all, and that to employ it was either thoughtless or fraudulent. It is not pleasant to have to argue against a superstition which is held most strongly by men and women who are often regarded as the best in our society, and against a belief that has become almost the new religion of our time (and in which many of the ministers of [the] old religion have found their refuge), and which has become the recognised mark of the good man. 6 But the present universality of that belief proves no more the reality of its object than did the universal belief in witches or the philosopher’s stone. Nor does the long history of the conception of distributive justice understood as an attribute of individual conduct (and now often treated as synonymous with ‘social justice’) prove that it has any relevance to the positions arising from the market process. I believe indeed that the greatest service I can still render to my fellow men would be if it were in my power to make them ashamed of ever again using that hollow incantation. I felt it my duty at least to try and free them of that incubus which today makes fine sentiments the instruments for the destruction of all values of a free civilization – 5and to try this at the risk of gravely offending many the strength of whose moral feelings I respect.
The present version of the central chapter of this volume has in consequence of this history in some respects a slightly different character from the rest of the volume which in all essentials was completed six or seven years earlier. There was, on the one hand, nothing I could positively demonstrate but my task was to put the burden of proof squarely on those who employ the term. On the other hand, in re-writing that chapter I no longer had that easy access to adequate library facilities which I had when I prepared the first draft of this volume. I have in consequence not been able in that chapter systematically to take account of the more recent literature on the topics I discussed as I had endeavoured to do in the rest of this volume. In one instance the feeling that I ought to justify my position vis-à-vis a major recent work has also contributed to delay the completion of this volume. But after careful consideration I have come to the conclusion that what I might have to say about John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice (1971) 7 would not assist in the pursuit of my immediate object because the differences between us seemed more verbal than substantial. Though the first impression of readers may be different, Rawls’ statement which I quote later in this volume 8 seems to me to show that we agree on what is to me the essential point. Indeed, as I indicate in a note to that passage, it appears to me that Rawls has been widely misunderstood on this central issue.
