Justice

Uniting both individual ethics and group politics, the idea of justice is as often-cited as it is rarely-defined.

Plato’s Theory of Justice

Plato in his Republic famously compared the ethical and political dimensions of justice: that a just state (or polis) was like a just individual: harmonious and good (of course those terms must then be defined). Plato begins with what justice isn’t via three of his interlocutors:

• The traditional Cephalus argues that justice means adhering to obligation and being honest, to which Socrates argues that while we are obligated to return that which we borrow, would you return an axe to a madman?
• The practical Polemarchus argues that justice means giving each what they deserve, helping friends and harming enemies, against which Socrates argues that won’t harming enemies make them, and thus the world, less just? Can an act really be just if it leaves everyone on balance worse off?
• The cynical Thrasymachus argues that might makes right, isn’t justice just whatever the powerful can get away with? Socrates argues that this essentially means justice doesn’t exist, and so he proceeds to define it.

Justice in the Christian Tradition

I was surprised to learn that what’s often translated as “righteousness” in the New Testament is the Greek word dikaiosune, which is the same word Plato uses in the Republic. Having grown up a Christian, I look back and wonder how my understanding of the faith would have been different had it focused more on being just than on being right. This aligns with Liberation theology.

John Rawls’ “Veil of Ignorance”

The philosopher John Rawls had a novel theory of justice: that a just society is one you would build without knowing (behind a “veil of ignorance” of) who you would be in that society. Of course one doesn’t typically build societies from scratch, but by imagining the kind of society most of us would choose without knowing who we’d be in it can give us a vision of a just society to start nudging ours in the direction of.

You can apply this theory the next time you’re slicing a cake: one person cuts and the other person chooses. The veil of ignorance (not knowing which piece you’ll get) incentivizes the slicer to cut fairly.

With both cake and a just society, this doesn’t necessarily imply equality. Just as you might cut a narrower slice of cake if it has some extra frosting to compensate, most people would be okay with a degree of economic inequality commensurate with the added responsibility of, for example, running a company. But no one could reasonably choose a society in which the have-nots suffer, since there’s a chance you could end up in that position.

See also: Towards a Theory of Justice for Artificial Intelligence The abstract hooked me: “this paper explores the relationship between artificial intelligence and principles of distributive justice. Drawing upon the political philosophy of John Rawls, it holds that the basic structure of society should be understood as a composite of sociotechnical systems“.