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

Classical Liberalism #8: What elements make up our idea of justice?

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How can we ensure people get what they are due, in terms of justice?

Philosophy professor at University of Arizona, David Schmidtz says the answer to this question needs context. Who is the person we're referring to, and to what are we responding?

Some elements of justice include equality, returning favors, and the right to air grievances

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DAVID SCHMIDTZ:

David Schmidtz is Kendrick Professor of Philosophy, Eller Chair of Service-Dominant Logic, and editor of Social Philosophy & Policy at the University of Arizona. Dave’s seventeen former doctoral students all went on to faculty positions. They published articles in Journal of Philosophy, Philosophical Review, and Ethics. Oxford, Cambridge, Blackwell, and Princeton have published their books.

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TRANSCRIPT:

DAVID SCHMIDTZ: The concept of justice is a concept of what people are due. 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 due. 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 is for children to get what they need. And then we might say well, here's the trick is 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 is no, actually it isn't. 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 desert 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...

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