The marginalisation of justice in public discourse
Context:
- In India today, while self-interest and national glory dominate, concern for distributive justice is rare.
- Two ideas appear to dominate our public discourse today. One, somewhat implicitly, self-interest.
- The second, far more explicitly, national glory. How the pursuit of material or cultural self-interest affects others does not seem to bother us. There is little acknowledgement that the pursuit of greed and narrow self-interest leads to severe inequalities, to an unequal division of social benefits.
Sharing benefits and burdens
What is distributive justice and why does it matter?
- Justice requires that we not be greedy and grab things; instead, we share them with those we do not know or love. Simply put, a sense of justice is born when we begin sharing things with strangers.
- In fact, the idea of distributive justice presupposes not only a social condition marked by an absence of love or familiarity, but also others, which the Scottish philosopher, David Hume, termed ‘the circumstances of justice’. For instance, a society where everything is abundantly available would not need justice. Each of us will have as much of everything we want. Without the necessity of sharing, justice becomes redundant. Equally, in a society with massive scarcity, justice is impossible. In order to survive, each person is compelled to grab whatever happens to be available. Justice, therefore, is possible and necessary in societies with moderate scarcity.
Giving persons their due
- The basic idea of justice is that ‘each person gets what is properly due to him or her’, that the benefits and burdens of society be distributed in a manner that gives each person his or her due.
- Two main contenders exist for interpreting what is due to persons of equal moral worth. For the first need-based principle, what is due to a person is what she really needs, i.e., whatever is necessary for general human well-being.
- Second, the principle of desert for which what is due to a person is what he or she deserves, determined not by birth or tradition but by a person’s own qualities, for instance ‘natural’ talent or productive effort.
Conclusion:
- Our society is afflicted by deep material, cultural and knowledge-related inequalities. Worse, these inequalities are growing by the day. Sometimes they are accompanied by blatant assertions of unequal moral worth, though today, a deafening silence on social and distributive justice is more common.
- It is therefore imperative to ask where we stand in relation to different forms of egalitarian justice mentioned in our Preamble.
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