Determining What Notion of “Justice” We Should Protect

-- By KregKatoski - 27 Feb 2009

Advantage in society is not a right

If we adopt Thurman Arnold’s view and assume that success in life is dependent mostly upon chance, this should indeed affect the way in which we look at our role in society. We tend to believe that we have a “right” to what we own and feel we have earned, though this is obtained simply by the luck of the draw. But is it just that we should fall into such a position of success while others suffer through no fault of their own? I do not believe it is, and if we are to seek justice, this ought to affect what we do with our lives and how we view the policies of our institutions with respect to individuals in varying circumstances.

Assessing society’s current values

In order to effect social change, we must first assess our current values to determine whether these are truly the values that we should seek to protect. It seems that in terms of values, we do not fully believe, as Holmes suggests, that “things are what they do.” Rather, we still tend to believe in many instances that things are what they signify. For example, we would find it inhumane for a criminal to be beaten with a cane as punishment for a crime, while we would scarcely flinch in sentencing him to 25 years in prison. Though I do not have experience with either form of punishment, I propose that the vast majority of the population would prefer to be subjected to the former rather than the latter. Why, then, is the preferable punishment considered less humane? What purpose do our values serve if they stand in opposition to desires of those it would seem they are intended to protect?

The role of institutions in shaping our values

We seem to get so caught up in what society tells us our values ought to be that we never truly consider whether these values actually make sense to us. We may use these core values as the basis for justifying other beliefs, but we rarely ever question the values themselves. We perceive the spectrum of values imposed on us through our institutions as the culmination of hundreds of years of rational thought and experience as to what is and is not just, when, in reality, the emergence of such a system of values is far less organized and systematic than we would like to believe. As Arnold suggests, the elements of consciousness and choice that we assign to our organizations tend to be misplaced, leading us to assign greater significance to their social output than may be warranted.

Deciding upon a conception of justice

But if the values imposed by our institutions are inadequate, how then should we choose what to value as a society? Here, we might employ a method similar to that used by John Rawls in postulating his “Justice as Fairness” theory, in which he seems to borrow much from Arnold's ideas about our place in society resulting largely from chance. He suggests that justice would be served by individuals deciding upon principles to govern society behind a “veil of ignorance,” which would prevent them from knowing their place in society, as well as any personal or familial attributes. This “veil of ignorance” might allow us to better decide what values we ought to place importance upon in our society, helping us to set aside our biases, at least in theory. Once we establish what values are of importance to us and what our conception of justice truly is, we might be able to pursue goals in furtherance of such a notion of justice, ultimately reforming our institutions to better account for the disparity in fortune assigned by chance.

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