The Bounds of Justice.
Barry, Christian
The Bounds of Justice, Onora O'Neill (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2000), 226 pp., $54.95 cloth, $19.95 paper.
In the third chapter of Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals,
Kant argues that in conceiving of the world human beings must adopt two
standpoints: a theoretical standpoint from which we inquire into facts
about the natural world, and a practical standpoint from which we
deliberate about how to act. The distinction between theoretical and
practical standpoints is central to understanding the array of complex
and highly original arguments that Onora O'Neill develops in her
new collection of ten essays, The Bounds of Justice. "Fruitful work
in ethics or politics must be practical," she insists. "It
must address the needs of agents who have yet to act, who are working
out what to do, not the needs of spectators who are looking for ways of
assessing or appraising what has already been done" (p. 7). In
Bounds of Justice, O'Neill assesses theories of political justice
and the language that they employ in terms of their capacity to help us
work out what to do.
"Justice" has historically been predicated of many
different things, including actions, individual character,
distributions, and social rules. O'Neill largely limits the use of
"justice" to assessing what Rawls calls the "basic
structure of society"--the rules and institutions that govern the
interactions of participants within a social system. Justice is,
O'Neill claims, "a matter of keeping to principles that can be
adopted by all members of any plurality of potentially interacting
beings" (p. 158). O'Neill's account of justice is
concerned primarily with obligations that individuals have toward one
another insofar as they interact or coexist under shared social rules.
While we may owe obligations to human beings or other life forms with
which we have no contact, failing to perform them cannot be described as
an injustice. "If women were all transported to Betelgeuse, and so
beyond all interaction with the remnant men on earth, neither men nor
women would have to see one another as falling within the domain of
justice" (p. 157).
O'Neill adopts this position because she believes that we have
extremely weighty moral reasons to avoid coercion and injury and that we
cannot plausibly be seen as harming persons with whom we are not at
least indirectly connected by shared social rules. This understanding of
justice (which has been developed in different ways by political
philosophers such as Charles Beitz and Thomas Pogge) avoids the
potentially extremely demanding claim, common to understandings of
justice as primarily a property of distributions, that each person is
duty-bound to help fulfill the rights of all others, regardless of his
causal relation to their predicament. At the same time, this account is
able to avoid endorsing a view that limits our obligations of justice to
members of the same nation-state. For O'Neill, transnational
economic structures raise questions of justice precisely because they
can be deeply involved in impoverishing people and rendering them
extremely vulnerable to coercion: "The poor, and above all those
who are impoverished providers, cannot refuse or renegotiate their role
in economic structures or transactions which hurt them, even when these
structures and transactions could in principle be changed" (p.
164). In failing to contribute to the reform of such structures we
wrong, and do not merely fail to help, those who are hurt by them.
O'Neill's understanding of justice is instructive in that it
emphasizes the indirect ways that individuals can harm each other:
through the creation of institutional arrangements and social rules that
avoidably inflict hardships or extreme vulnerabilities on many
participants.
Another central concern of Bounds of Justice is to determine the
role that principles should play in evaluating the justice of social
rules and institutions. Principles state general standards to which
social rules and institutions should conform. In articulating general
principles we avoid merely accepting the (often abusive) traditions and
practices found in different societies (p. 145). It is therefore
important to begin the task of "working out what to do" by
developing principles of justice and engaging in the practice of
justifying beliefs and practices. The problem with many theories of
justice that articulate general principles, however, is that they
"are often rather uncommunicative about the implication of
principles for particular cases" (p. 50). The indeterminacy of
principles for particular cases is clearly a problem for those who seek
guidance from them. An adequate theory of justice, O'Neill argues,
must reduce indeterminacy on the one hand and avoid relativism on the
other.
Principles, O'Neill argues, can be of great value and should
not, as many communitarians and "ethic of care" theorists
argue, be discarded. Rather than denying any role to principles in
thinking about justice, they should be understood as minimal starting
points that "prescribe constraints rather than regiment action;
they recommend types of action, policy and attitude rather than
providing detailed instructions for living" (p. 53). Such detailed
instructions require that principles be supplemented by judgment, but
not subordinated to it. "All practical reasoning requires judgment
and deliberation by which principles are applied to particular
cases" (p. 159). It is not always clear how robust O'Neill
thinks these "minimal" starting points must be to help in
practical reflection. She faults consequentialist theories because they
provide "overly pliant instruments of calculation" for
assessing institutions, and claims that Rawlsian theories of
international justice are of limited use as "views about which
institutional changes would most improve the lot of the poorest are
bound to be hotly contested" (p. 134). These criticisms suggest
that O'Neill wants principles that can be applied to questions of
justice in a relatively straightforward way. At the same time, however,
the fundamental principles that she herself adduces, such as noninjury,
noncoercion, and nondeception, seem equally difficult to apply since the
question of which policies and institutions "support the capacities
of vulnerable agents" (p. 140) is equally hotly contested.
O'Neill claims that in constructing an account of justice we
should adopt a Kantian approach that starts by identifying
"fundamental principles for structuring lives and institutions,
which can then be used to guide choice among the countless more specific
principles that can be embedded in the laws, policies, practices and
norms of social life" (p. 137). This, of course, leaves open the
form that these principles should take. Many have advocated human rights
as the best idiom for articulating fundamental principles of justice.
O'Neill, however, claims that these principles are best presented
in the idiom of obligations. We should begin the practical task by
trying to understand the nature of our obligations to each other.
To make her case/she presents several forceful criticisms of rights
discourse from the perspective of the overarching theme of these essays:
that moral theory be oriented toward agents who are deliberating about
what they ought to do. Rights, she says, need to be translated into
obligations before they can help guide action. Because they are only
indirectly action-guiding, rights are often used in sloppy and lazy
ways. She also points out that rights are often promulgated without any
rigorous analysis of who bears counterpart obligations for their
fulfillment. The right to an adequate standard of living, for example,
must be institutionalized before an allocation of obligations for its
fulfillment is possible: "If the claimants of supposed rights to
food or development cannot find where to lodge their claims, these are
empty manifesto rights" (p. 127). Moreover the rhetoric of rights
allows evasion, its headiness permitting people to pay lip service to
important social goals without taking on the task of thinking through
what is required of them to bring about their realization. Finally,
O'Neill argues that rights discourse cannot adequately serve as a
core for a theory of justice because it cannot capture many important
moral demands. All rights have correlative obligations, but only
"perfect" obligations that specify the obligation bearer, the
way the obligation is enacted, and the person for whom it is to be
performed can be the object of rights claims. "Imperfect
obligations," an important part of morality, are simply overlooked
by the rights perspective, or dealt with in an awkward and
self-defeating way through the promulgation of "manifesto
rights" such as the "right" to development. O'Neill
prefers the obligation-based moral perspective because of its clarity,
forthrightness, and completeness.
Wonderful as the virtues of clarity, forthrightness, and
completeness may be, there is not much reason to suppose that an
obligation-based moral perspective will be more likely to exhibit them.
Some readers of these pages will be familiar with the "Universal
Declaration of Human Responsibilities" (E&IA, vol. 12) proposed
by the Interaction Council, surely as evasive and obscurantist a
document as any human rights manifesto. Indeed, the obligations that
O'Neill herself promulgates offer only the thinnest indication of
what we, in our complex and highly interdependent world, ought to do.
Surely many rights lack specificity, but duties of noncoercion and
noninjury can be equally unspecific. O'Neill can certainly claim
that her obligation-based approach is superior to some rights-based
views, but she has not thereby discredited more plausible variants of
the rights-based approach.
The Bounds of Justice is an excellent collection of essays. Readers
are likely to be left hungry to learn more about some of the important
issues that are touched upon but not fully fleshed out in this volume.
They will want to know what O'Neill's account of the
interaction of principles and judgment in practical reasoning will
amount to in practice, and how, concretely, her obligation-based
conception of transnational justice would evaluate existing
institutions. One of the great strengths of O'Neill's book is
that it demonstrates that quite abstract theorizing about justice can
help us think about how to live and motivate us to live better. The
recognition that we have the capacity to make others suffer or render
them extremely susceptible to coercion and injury through the
construction of unjust rules and practices puts us well on the way to a
more sensitive understanding of how to live.
--Christian Barry
Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs
