The Concept of Justice: Is Social Justice Just?

• Author: Burros, Trevor
• Position: Book review

The Concept of Justice: Is Social Justice Just?

Thomas Patrick Burke

New York: Continuum, 2011, 256 pp.

Justice is the primary object of political philosophy. Yet, like so many of our highest aspirations, we are prone to use capacious words that can create consensus in their most abstract formulations but engender discord, if not worse, in more specific forms. "Justice" has always been like this. During a civil war or an intense political conflict, both sides will preach the justness of their cause, and neither will claim to be fighting on the side of "injustice."

As much as political philosophers have penned defenses of particular conceptions of justice, they have also attacked rival conceptions either as being unjust or as being category mistakes. In The Concept of Justice, Thomas Patrick Burke engages in the latter type of criticism, arguing that what is usually described as "social justice" is in fact wholly different from, and antagonistic to, "genuine justice."

For Burke, genuine justice has four characteristics: First, it is an ethical judgment. As such, it can only describe actions of individuals and not mere states of affairs--"only persons and their actions can be unethical. To speak of a state of affairs as unethical, independently of any unethical action that produced it, is to commit a fallacy." While Bob can perform an unjust action, it cannot be unjust if Bob was born with cerebral palsy, a state of affairs that no one culpably acted to bring into existence. Because it would be strange to describe Bob's condition as "unethical," it is equally odd to describe it as "unjust" (but we are certainly free to describe it as good or bad).

Second, justice is a "relationship between wills" which requires not merely action, but an internal state of mind, amens rea, for the action to be either just or unjust. An assault committed while sleepwalking or an involuntary muscle twitch that harms another do not fall under the category of "justice."

The third criterion, which flows from the first two, is that "justice and injustice entail individual accountability and responsibility." "Responsibility" can be assigned only to purposeful actions that are the product of the will. Injustice can be corrected by making accountable those who are responsible.

The last characteristic is also entailed by the previous three: "If action, will, and responsibility are key elements of justice, this can only be so on condition that the will is free." In other...