Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do

by Michael J. Sandel

Kant and Rawls do not deny they are advancing certain moral ideals. Their quarrel is with theories of justice that derive rights from some conception of the good. Utilitarianism is one such theory. It takes the good to consist in maximizing pleasure or welfare, and asks what system of rights is likely to achieve it.

If we are to think of ourselves as autonomous beings, we must first will the moral law. Only then, after we’ve arrived at the principle that defines our duties and rights, can we ask what conceptions of the good are compatible with it.

“The liberties of equal citizenship are insecure when founded upon teleological principles.”28

Kant and Rawls reject Aristotle’s teleology because it doesn’t seem to leave us room to choose our good for ourselves. It is easy to see how Aristotle’s theory gives rise to this worry. He sees justice as a matter of fit between persons and the ends or goods appropriate to their nature. But we are inclined to see justice as a matter of choice, not fit.

The notion that justice should be neutral toward conceptions of the good life reflects a conception of persons as freely choosing selves, unbound by prior moral ties. These ideas, taken together, are characteristic of modern liberal political thought. By liberal, I don’t mean the opposite of conservative, as these terms are used in American political debate. In fact, one of the distinctive features of American political debate is that the ideals of the neutral state and the freely choosing self can be found across the political spectrum. Much of the argument over the role of government and markets is a debate about how best to enable individuals to pursue their ends for themselves.

This is at least the conclusion to which I’m drawn. Having wrestled with the philosophical arguments I’ve laid before you, and having watched the way these arguments play out in public life, I do not think that freedom of choice—even freedom of choice under fair conditions—

is an adequate basis for a just society. What’s more, the attempt to find neutral principles of justice seems to me misguided. It is not always possible to define our rights and duties without taking up substantive moral questions; and even when it’s possible it may not be desirable. I’ll now try to explain why.

Moral deliberation is more about interpreting my life story than exerting my will. It involves choice, but the choice issues from the interpretation; it is not a sovereign act of will.

We all approach our own circumstances as bearers of a particular social identity. I am someone’s son or daughter, someone’s cousin or uncle; I am a citizen of this or that city, a member of this or that guild or profession; I belong to this clan, that

tribe, this nation. Hence what is good for me has to be the good for one who inhabits these roles. As such, I inherit from the past of my family, my city, my tribe, my nation, a variety of debts, inheritances, rightful expectations and obligations. These constitute the given of my life, my moral starting point. This is in part what gives my own life its moral particularity.39

So if the liberal account of obligation is right, the average citizen has no special obligations to his or her fellow citizens, beyond the universal, natural duty not to commit injustice.

Unlike natural duties, obligations of solidarity are particular, not universal; they involve moral responsibilities we owe, not to rational beings as such, but to those with whom we share a certain history. But unlike voluntary obligations, they do not depend on an act of consent.

THREE CATEGORIES OF MORAL RESPONSIBILITY 1. Natural duties: universal; don’t require consent 2. Voluntary obligations: particular; require consent 3. Obligations of solidarity: particular; don’t require consent

“It seems that the sentiment of humanity evaporates and weakens in being extended over the entire world, and that we cannot be affected by the calamities in Tartary or Japan the way we are by those of a European people. Interest and commiseration must somehow be limited and restrained to be active.”

“It is only if patriotic sentiment has some moral basis, only if communal cohesion makes for obligations and shared meanings, only if there are members as well as strangers, that state officials would have any reason to worry especially about the welfare of their own people . . . and the success of their own culture and politics.”

The capacity for pride and shame in the actions of family members and fellow citizens is related to the capacity

for collective responsibility. Both require seeing ourselves as situated selves—claimed by moral ties we have not chosen and implicated in the narratives that shape our identity as moral agents.

You can’t really take pride in your country and its past if you’re unwilling to acknowledge any responsibility for carrying its story into the present, and discharging the moral burdens that may come with it.

Obligations of solidarity are objectionable only if they lead us to violate a natural duty. If the narrative conception of the person is right, however, obligations of solidarity can be more demanding than the liberal account suggests—even to the point of competing with natural duties.

If loyalty is a sentiment with no genuine moral weight, then Lee’s predicament is simply a conflict between morality on the one hand and mere feeling or prejudice on the other. But by conceiving it that way, we misunderstand the moral stakes.58

What we admire is the disposition to see and bear one’s life circumstance as a reflectively situated being—claimed by the history that implicates me in a particular life, but self-conscious of its particularity, and so alive to competing claims and wider horizons. To have character is to live in recognition of one’s (sometime conflicting) encumbrances.

the dilemmas they faced make sense as moral dilemmas only if you acknowledge that the claims of loyalty and solidarity can weigh in the balance against other moral claims, including the duty to bring criminals to justice. If all our obligations are founded on consent, or on universal duties we owe persons as persons, it’s hard to account for these fraternal predicaments.

The claims of solidarity seen in these examples are familiar features of our moral and political experience. It would be difficult to live, or to make sense of our lives, without them. But it is equally difficult to account for them in the language of moral individualism. They can’t be captured by an ethic of consent.

This is the idea that says we are unbound by any moral ties we haven’t chosen; to be free is to be the author of the only obligations that constrain us.

For Kant and Rawls, the right is prior to the good. The principles of justice that define our duties and rights should be neutral with respect to competing conceptions of the good life.

Kant argues, we must abstract from our contingent interests and ends. To deliberate about justice, Rawls maintains, we should set aside our particular aims, attachments, and conceptions of the good. That’s the point of thinking about justice behind a veil of ignorance.

He doesn’t believe that principles of justice can or should be neutral with respect to the good life. To the contrary, he maintains that one of the purposes of a just constitution is to form good citizens and to cultivate good character. He doesn’t think it’s possible to deliberate about justice without deliberating about the meaning of the goods—the offices, honors, rights, and opportunities—that societies allocate.

well. If we are freely choosing, independent selves, unbound by moral ties antecedent to choice, then we need a framework of rights that is neutral among ends. If the self is prior to its ends, then the right must be prior to the good.

If deliberating about my good involves reflecting on the good of those communities with which my identity is bound, then the aspiration to neutrality may be mistaken. It may not be possible, or even desirable, to deliberate about justice without deliberating about the good life.

Liberal political theory was born as an attempt to spare politics and law from becoming embroiled in moral and religious controversies.

Deciding important public questions while pretending to a neutrality that cannot be achieved is a recipe for backlash and resentment. A politics emptied of substantive moral engagement makes for an impoverished civic life. It is also an open invitation to narrow, intolerant moralisms. Fundamentalists rush in where liberals fear to tread.