I begin with Hart’s explication of the idea of justice. He starts off promisingly, rebuking thoselawyers who write as if the ideas of justice and morality are ‘co
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extensive’. In reality, justiceis a ‘distinct segment of morality’ (p.157), one moral value
among others which the law maypossess or lack. I am deeply sympathetic to this line of thought. It seems to me thatconsiderable damage has been done in contemporary moral, political and legal philosophy bythe failure to keep in mind that justice is one value among others. The damage consists, on theone hand, in the watering-down of the category of justice, as it is stretched to encompasspractically any consideration with a positive ethical valence. And, on the other hand, in thedistortion or sidelining of important ethical ideas, such as those of charity and mercy, thatcannot be made to fit within the rubric of justice. Both of these tendencies are manifest in the
leading work of political philosophy of the last fifty years, John Rawls’s
A Theory of Justice.
Although Rawls characterizes justice as the ‘first virtue’ of social institutions, implying that
there are others besides, the overall effect is undercut by his expansive interpretation of justice
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and his failure to elucidate in any serious way the nature and content of politicalvalues other than justice. Justice, on this view, becomes equivalent to the moral principles thatappropriately regulate the basic structure of society. One consequence of this trend is that welose a perspicuous grasp of the diversity of moral concerns and of their relation to each other,including potential conflicts between justice and other values. This pluralistic concern is onethat would have resonated strongly with Hart.