With all of the conceptions from my last post in mind, I would like to begin to evaluate them and determine and articulate what it is that I believe. I must first say that justice is not the same as fairness. In many cases they are identical, but in my mind justice is most fundamentally the first of these conceptions. Justice is primarily the moral principle of consequences matching actions. The other conceptions, I think, are more accurately identified as fairness. To justify this statement, it seems sufficient to me to note that this is the "classical" meaning of the two words (justice and fairness), and that the terms have been combined in some discussion primarily for rhetorical purposes (the term "social justice" having been coined in the 19th century to put equality on the same rhetorical footing as the preeminent position that justice enjoyed in political philosophy and legal theory), though it seems more sensible to keep the two terms separate, if only to avoid confusion.
That said, I've merely shifted the discussion semantically: Is it justice or fairness that should have a preeminent place in the law? Or can they both enjoy an equal place? Well, they cannot both be universally observed, for at times fairness may even contradict the fundamental justice of actions and consequences: For example, a "perfectly equal" society requires that rewards are the same for all, independent of their actions, so that consequences to actions simply do not exist. I can reject this conception without hesitation, for it is contrary even to physical truth: once again, reality is not kind to the belief that consequences to actions may be ignored. Thus, as a practical matter, dismissing consequences to action seems untenable. More to the point, I may appeal to both revelation and conscience to assert that justice is a fundamental moral law. I think there may also be a logical argument for justice being an essential principle, yet I have been unable to formulate it, so that for the time being I will, from a logical perspective, take the status of the justice of consequences for actions as a moral law which ought to be satisfied (at the very least in most cases) as axiomatic. Perhaps in a later post I will find myself more capable of articulating some logic to it, or perhaps a reader may supply it, but I cannot do it now.
I have utterly rejected the "perfect equality" conception of fairness as inconsistent with the moral law of justice (at least in an imperfect society), but it is important to consider some of the other ideas of equality. The requirement of equal treatment, rewarding equally for equal goods and services or punishing equally for equal crimes, seems to me a part of the ideal of fairness, but not universally required by morality. Of course, in the restricted matter of government, I believe that equal treatment under the law is emergent from the principle of justice, for any government involvement in punishment for wrongdoing (rather than leaving it to God, which may be called for under certain circumstances, as considered in the recent post on liberty) must be regulated by the principle of justice, in which the consequences correspond to the action, or the punishment fits the crime. That at times a pardon may be reasonable as an act of mercy or in consequence of actions external to the crime, but the point is that in a general sense, all should be treated equally under the law because the moral consequences that fit actions are consistent from one person to another. On the other hand, in private matters, a person may deal with one person justly, and then for the same actions reward another person more, giving the second person what we may consider a gift in addition to the just reward for their actions. One can only justly act charitably in this manner with his own means, so that a manager at a business paying his friends more out of money which is not actually his is unjust, but if the owner of the business were to pay one more than another out of kindness, or if the manager were to take out of his own pocket and give money to an employee, I could not consider those actions wrong in and of themselves (although we may get into a complex discussion of motives here, and these actions may be dishonest when taken with other things going on). You may argue that gifts in and of themselves are not just, as they reward where there was no action, but I do not believe that that which benefits people beyond the minimum requirements of justice is immoral, that injustice can only be invoked as immorality when the injustice is in some way harmful to someone involved. When a gift is given of the free will of the giver, then such a case is not immoral.
There is also the issue of equality in matters beyond the control of those involved. I still do not believe that this is justice, but I will also suggest that inequality is not enforced by justice. A child of rich parents is not entitled by justice to his parents' wealth, for it does not come in consequence of his actions. If the parents bestow riches on their child as a gift, then this is not an offense against justice, but neither is it an offense against justice for the child to receive none of his parents' riches. In this particular example, there is an interaction between fairness and liberty, wherein the libertarian view asserts that the parents have the right to give their riches to the child, but fairness asserts that the child has no more right to the money than any other, and so it should be distributed among many children. However, justice itself is not implicated. Other examples such as natural disaster, compensation for loss due to crime, and the accidental discovery of oil in your backyard have similar results: justice neither obliges nor prevents the loss or benefit from being shared across the population, but other principles do tend to conflict with fairness in each case, leading to a more complicated resolution to the question of what ought to be done. These sorts of questions ought to be addressed (and I may approach some of them in future posts), but that will leave the subject of justice, and each problem must be addressed individually, so I will have to consider these issues another time.
Title: T.H. White, The Once and Future King
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