Democratic justice and contractarian injustice

Abstract

This paper places Weale’s theory in its historical context, clarifying the dispute between Brian Barry’s justice as impartiality and David Gauthier’s justice as mutual advantage. Contra Weale, who argues that justice can involve both mutual advantage and impartiality, this paper suggests that impartiality and mutual advantage are incompatible, and that Barry’s position is preferable to Gauthier’s. Three specific issues will be addressed: First, Weale’s theory of democratic justice includes an account of injustice which is unpersuasive. Secondly, deliberative democracy does not only require equality of power, as Weale suggests, but also material (economic) equality. Thirdly, Weale’s claim that workers should be allowed to keep the full fruits of their labour is questionable.

Keywords:

• Brian Barry
• David Gauthier
• injustice
• impartiality
• mutual advantage

Acknowledgements

I’m grateful to Albert Weale, the participants of the symposium on his book at LUISS University in Rome, two anonymous referees, and in particular to Valentina Gentile for detailed written comments on an earlier version of this paper.

Notes

1. Here I’m going along with the standard luck-egalitarian reading of Rawls’s theory of justice. However, Sheffler (2003) has shown that Rawls’s emphasis on the moral arbitrariness of people’s natural talents is a way to contrast a counter theory based on the principle of ‘formal equality of opportunity’. In Rawls’s view, a system that allows the economic distribution of natural and social contingencies too closely is likely to compromise the status of some citizen as equal. But this is different from a luck-egalitarian view of justice. I am grateful to Valentina Gentile for highlighting this alternative interpretation.

2. On risk and morality, see Hansson (2013) and Ferretti (2015).

3. Perhaps Weale is influenced by the Marxist tradition, and in particular by the work of G.A.Cohen, but without textual references these remain mere speculations not worth indulging in.