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Rational, Fair, and Reasonable
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 January 2009
Extract
There can be no doubt that Brian Barry has made an enormous contribution to the clarification of the ideas of justice current in contemporary political thought. In Barry's Justice as Impartiality he explicitly distinguishes and sets in competition three models of justice: justice as mutual advantage; justice as reciprocity; and justice as impartiality (the ‘rational’, ‘fair’, and ‘reasonable’ of my title), and he argues that we should prefer the last of these. What I want to do here is to consider four questions. First, what is this competition a competition about? Second, has Barry adequately characterized the contenders? Third, can the competition be won on the grounds Barry suggests? Fourth, is it a competition that we should want to be won by a single theory? By contrast I want to argue that there are advantages in retaining a pluralist perspective in which all three approaches remain in play.
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References
1 Barry, Brian, Justice as Impartiality, Oxford, 1995Google Scholar. Page numbers in the text refer to this volume.
2 Gibbard, Alan, Wise Choices, Apt Feelings, Oxford, 1990Google Scholar.
3 Scanlon, T., ‘Contractualism and Utilitarianism’, in Utilitarianism and Beyond, ed. Sen, Amartya and Williams, Bernard, Cambridge, 1982, pp. 103–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
4 Gibbard, Alan, ‘Constructing Justice’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, xx (1991), 264–79Google Scholar.
5 Rawls, John, Political Liberalism, New York, 1993, p. 17nGoogle Scholar.
6 On arriving in the United States on a Fellowship in 1985 I was treated to a lecture by a political journalist who claimed that a new mood of ‘reciprocity’ was blowing through America. I expected to be given examples – as were under discussion in the UK at the time – involving new schemes for awarding ordinary employees shares in the companies in which they worked. Instead I was told about the idea of requiring beneficiaries of welfare benefits to perform community service. Both proposals, though, appeal to the idea of making benefits conform to burdens.
7 Hume, David, Enquiries, ed. Selby-Bigge, L. A., 3rd ed., Oxford, 1975, pp. 190–1Google Scholar.
8 I have discussed this principle, with application to the European Union, in ‘Integration, Justice, and Exclusion’, Principles of Justice and the European Union, ed. Bernitz, U. and Hallstrom, Par, Stockholm, 1996Google Scholar.
9 For another reason for keeping a pluralistic perspective, see my ‘Pluralistic Models of Political Obligation’, Philosophica, lvi (1996), 7–28Google Scholar.