The Pie of Justice

I’ve never been pleased with my materials on justice. It’s not the easiest concept in the world to explain to bleary-eyed novices, or for that matter, to be explained by bleary-eyed political scientists. At its core it’s simple enough, but the further you stretch it from the core, the more goofy you start to sound. The fact that there are different kinds of justice that we often deal with (to wit, distributive and retributive) doesn’t help. If we have a justice-system resolution early on in basic training, it can throw a noob’s understanding of justice per se out the window for a couple of years, if not an entire debate career.

Distributive justice alone, however, ought to be simple enough. Easy as pie actually, if you think about it.

Imagine a pie. Imagine one person. Now, that one person gets to keep the whole pie. There’s no issues there. The world would be so simple if there were only one person in it (unless that person was Jon Cruz, but that’s another story altogether).

Now imagine a pie and two people. Now we start to think about cutting up the pie in a satisfactory way between the two people, and that’s where justice comes in. Justice is the business of settling claims among a number of people, not just one person. So now we have two people with a claim on one pie. In the simplest of worlds, we just cut the pie in half and each takes an equal portion. That sounds eminently fair. Justice is fairness after all, the settling of claims in such a way that the settlement seems to be correct. If the settlement did not seem to be correct, we would say it is unfair, or unjust. To some extent, fair and just are synonyms, so when a debater (or John Rawls) defines justice as fairness, or giving each fair due, it’s a bit of a tautology. But if you dig into the definitions, you’ll see perhaps minor differences. For our purposes, however, they’re much of a muchness.

In order to insure the fair deal between the two pie eaters, by the way, we might install a precedent established in nursery school: one person cuts, the other person chooses. This approach to justice might be innate: if we have a moral instinct, this is one of the ways it inevitably expresses itself. Or, perhaps, it’s just so damned logical that we reinvent it again and again. Whatever. In any case, we have two issues, determining what is fair, and determining how to achieve that fairness. Halves are fair. Switching cutting and choosing achieves the fairness.

Pies being rather filling, we can cut them into satisfactory pieces for quite a few people. But, eventually, there’s really not enough for everyone. There is a limited amount of pie in the room. We have pie for, say, twelve people, but there are twenty people in the room. For argument’s sake, we will declare that the pie cannot be cut into few than twelve pieces. What to do?

If there’s twenty people and twelve pieces of pie, everyone cannot have an equal amount of pie. One solution to this problem that would perhaps be fair is to have a lottery for the pie. Every one of the twenty people has one chance at winning a piece of the pie. There will be twelve lucky winners. In this case, everyone has an equal opportunity at getting a piece of pie, even though everyone will not have a literally equal piece of pie. This, too, seems fair, and it much resembles some of the lotteries of life. In a just situation, we all have an equal opportunity for something, although all of us might not get that thing. If a university offers an entrance exam to everyone, and selects the top hundred people, everyone seems to have an equal opportunity of getting in, although only the top one hundred actually will. (This raises issues about what determines who is at the top, and whether its fair that Joe is smarter than Jack, but they are issues buried deep in the example. Let’s assume that the test is absolutely unbiased, whatever that means, and leave it at that.)

So we have equality, and we have equal opportunity, which are two different things, but which both seem fair. But let’s take it one step further. Our pie is not blueberry or apple. It is a metaphor for the amount of money available for financial aid for college. Like any pie, it is finite: it can only be cut into so many pieces. There’s also a meaningfulness aspect to it: give everyone just a dollar, and it doesn’t count. Financial aid needs to really aid people.

So, we have a finite amount of financial aid pie to divvy up among a large number of applicants for that aid. There are more applicants than can be aided. What do we do? This is, of course, representative of justice in the real world.

Before we can distribute the financial aid pie, we need to establish the criteria on which we will base of distribution decision. In the broadest either/or analysis, we could favor the people who are the smartest and have earned merit-based scholarships, or we could favor the people who are the poorest and need the money most. Neither of these is particularly right or wrong, but they would conflict. How do we decide the criteria?

John Rawls addresses this issue with his concept of a veil of ignorance. For Rawls, when we’re talking about distributing goods, we have to remove ourselves from the equation. That is, in this particular example, we cannot know if we ourselves happen to be smart or poor. Knowing this would prejudice our decision. The veil of ignorance is like a black box with us in it. We don’t know what we are, so when we make our decision, we will have no predetermined personal stake in it. This is a pretty good idea, otherwise those in the position of making the decision would presumably always choose in favor of themselves. Another term for this is the original position.

But of course, this doesn’t help us actually make the decision, it simply removes our biases from the decision-making. We are still faced with the challenge of determining how to spend the money (with no presumptions of how spending the money might affect us personally).

One can get pretty academic at this point, but one thing is pretty clear. However we decide, we need to give everyone an equal opportunity to share in the distribution. We can’t say that we’ll limit the distribution to only one racial group, for instance, to have it be equal on face. But then again, if one subscribes to a need to adjudicate cultural/societal inequalities in one’s distribution, then maybe one ascribes a system of weighting a la Affirmative Action. Meanwhile, it seems unfair to the smartest person in the world not to be rewarded with a scholarship because that person is, say, Bill Gates’s kid. On the other hand, if someone can afford the education without aid, why give them any, when that would take it away from someone else? Do we give it entirely based on need, where if you need the most, you get the most? In that case, how do we determine what need really is?

These questions can be answered a number of ways. Depending on what kind of pie exactly you’re talking about, some of what Rawls says might apply, to wit, that any decision must favor the least advantaged members of society (this favoritism is called the difference principle). But then, define “advantaged.” There will never be any easy, definitive answers.

So that’s what distributive justice is all about. How do we take goods, and fairly distribute them throughout society? Now, Rawls’s original position and difference principle are hypothetical ways of understanding the nature of society and justice. (Isn’t all philosophy hypothetical? Philosophy that isn’t hypothetical is call science.) To ask if this sort of thinking is at all relevant to the real world, think about taxes. Where does the money go? What should we do about less economically advantaged members of society? What about immigrants, especially poor folk who sneak in? If we’re going to give away some health care, who is going to get it? How are we going to split up Social Security payments? How do we apply any of this across borders with international aid? What are the just answers? They’re debatable. And, I assure you, debate them you will.

Anyhow, that’s distributive justice. Keep it in mind, and you’ll have it in a nutshell.