SİYASAL DÜŞÜNCE

It was Aristotle’s work where the criminal justice was distinguished from the social justice first time in the history of political thought that we know.

In the corpus of Roman Law, it is the first time in the history of political thought that justice was defined in relation to individual’s rights. This normative definition is followed by two further principles of the Emperor Justinian’s (A.D. 483-565) “Justinian Code” which states “the precepts of what are rights are these: to live uprightly, to do no harm to others, to render to each person what is his right”.

In utilitarian account of justice, utility is translated into the form of happiness and social justice is evaluated according to the happiness of society.

The first problem is with the consequentialist essence that proposes to advocate focusing on outcome in a sense that if the action, decision or policy yields happiness or not ignores the process in a sense that how this outcome is achieved. The second problem is associated with its welfarist characteristic that advocates focusing on a subjective well-being of individual, namely their happiness, to assess if the action, decision or the policy proposed is just or not. The third problem is concerned with the aggregative characteristic which advocates focusing on sum-total output instead of focusing on how much each person gets from total the total output.

It would not be, in this regard, a complete mistake to claim that libertarian model of justice does not primarily sustain the discussion in general realm of liberal rights including freedom of speech, equal rights in elections, right to assemble and so forth, but particularly around the rights of individual possessing or owning the private property and her/his command over the properties that they ought to be entitled to hold. Therefore, justice, according to the libertarian scholars, is a term that is mostly associated with the economic liberty, individuals’ commands over their property and freedom from taxation regimes.

According to Hayek, anything that is social evokes the attempt of redistribution that intrinsically pre-supposes intervention of the state. Thus, “social” presupposes regulation, in other words re-distribution of wealth and value through taxation regimes. There is no justice in any re-distributive policy, or regulation. Anything that assumes social concerns in distribution of wealth and value is a form of authority threatening the freedom, or liberty, of individual. It is within the free market that distribution of value and wealth is in the most just form.

All are included in Nozick’s theory of social justice.

According to Rawls, justice is considered as a “virtue of institutions” rather than “virtue of individuals”

Sen criticizes Rawls for prioritizing liberal rights over the economic ones. Sen asks, “why should we regard hunger, starvation and medical neglect to be invariably less important than the violation of any kind of personal liberty?” He adds that “it is indeed possible to accept that liberty must have some kind of priority, but total unrestrained priority is almost certainly an overkill”.

Fraser and Honneth share the same claim that an adequate understanding of justice should include both redistribution of wealth and recognition of different identities. It is Honneth who argues that redistributive demands are secondary while recognition demands become a matter of priority. And, it is Fraser who assumes that enhancing individual autonomy in the fields of economic redistribution and cultural recognition directly outputs societal participation.

Justice in everyday life is usually considered in relation to the workings of police, courts, judiciary and related criminal agencies. However, it is today commonly agreed that the idea of justice in political philosophy is multi-dimensional idea. This means that there are quite a number of different areas, or dimensions of human life, in every one which the idea of justice ought to be re-framed and re-established.

However, when we look at the multi-dimensionality of the idea of justice, we notice that it has at the top two main dimensions that should not be overlooked. The first is the “justice as criminal” and the second is “justice as social”.

Both in classical and contemporary ages, the idea of social justice is discussed in relation to various concepts such as rights, desert, merit, rule, covenant, consent, free-will, freedom, fairness, choice, well-being, poverty, inequality and so forth. The idea of justice that can be traced back to the ancient world is seen as a virtue of man and society in ancient Greek philosophy. Such an understanding of justice can easily be observed in the Republic, a well-known work of Plato, in which the central issue is “justice” discussed in relation to the concept of “virtue”.

Looking at the discussion on justice in the Ancient Greek tradition, we see that there was no clear distinction between what we call criminal or legal justice and social or distributive justice in Plato’s work. However, we observe such a distinction in Aristotle’s work where the criminal justice was distinguished from the social justice first time in the history of political thought.

Hume takes the attention to the moral dimension of a covenant, from which it can be inferred that Hume took an attention to the idea of fairness. In fact, such emphasis of Hume was the first of its kind that the idea of fairness was attempted to be introduced to the theory of justice. However, Hume moved beyond criticizing Hobbes in terms of flawed nature of covenant and proposed that aiming to increase the “public utility” is the essence of just action/decision.

It can be said that Bentham and Mill gained a more systematic form to the initial perspective of Hume who considered the just and good action in relation to its possibility of leading to increase the public utility. The question of how the utility should be assessed is answered through an emphasis on the happiness in the utilitarian account. This means that justness of an action, a decision, or a policy is evaluated to the extent of happiness that it yields for the society.

Robert Nozick is frequently pointed out as the leading figure of the contemporary libertarian model of social justice. Nozick’s theory of entitlement primarily focuses on individuals’ holding of private properties and is established on three principles as follows:

* If a person acquires a holding in accordance with justice, then this person is entitled to this holding.

* If a holding transferred to a person from someone else entitled this holding before and, thus, acquired by this person in accordance with justice, then this person is entitled to this holding.

* Anyone is entitled to a holding unless the implications of principle one and two.

One of the distinctive characteristics of the Rawlsian approach to social justice is associated with its institutional perspective. In Rawls’ approach, justice is considered as a “virtue of institutions” whilst the libertarian view considers it as “virtue of individuals” with the purpose of defining just action in the realm of individual’s rational choice

Sen criticizes Rawls’ focus on the means of good living instead of on the “actual living that people manage to achieve”. This criticism is in fact the primary criticism of Sen to Rawls. Sen reminds the distinction between the means and ends of good living. He stresses that “Rawls takes primary goods as the embodiment of advantage”. In other words, Rawls presupposes that equal holdings of primary goods yield equal advantage in achieving a good life.

It may not be wrong to stress that Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth are developers of the one of the most influential ideas towards justice in 21st century even though this is a quiet new idea in comparison to other theories of justice discussed above. Fraser and Honneth share the same claim that an adequate understanding of justice should include both redistribution of wealth and recognition of different identities. They consider that the idea of justice focusing on only economic welfare is reductionist since there has been an increasing demand for recognition of different identities such as ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religious groups, and so forth. Although they both agree that recognition and redistribution are indispensable parts of social justice, Honneth gives a fundamental emphasis to recognition and treating redistribution as a derivative subject, while Fraser perceives both recognition and redistribution as co-fundamental subjects which do not have priority over each other.