The challenge of defining justice is that it is both a moral and a legal concept.
Reason, courage, integrity, and independence, for example, are moral values with no direct legal counterpart. They each are, to use Ayn Rand’s succinct definition (p. 15), a “that which one acts to gain and/or keep” and derive from the fundamental standard of human life as a rational being. Reason therefore is the highest moral value and standard of ethics. The corresponding virtue is rationality, namely the use of reason as “one’s only source of knowledge, one’s only judge of values and one’s only guide to action” (p. 25). The other three virtues, as I have written before, are, respectively, “acting against great odds or opposition, remaining loyal to one’s fundamental values, [and] relying on one’s own mind to perceive reality.”
“Value” is what we act to attain. “Virtue” is the action of acquiring and sustaining the value.
In that earlier post, I said the virtue of justice means “judging oneself and others by conformity to moral and legal standards.” But there is an acting component to both the moral and legal concepts that I did not include. Justice is not only a matter of judging, but also a matter of acting in relation to the person being judged.
Let’s take the legal concept first, as it is relatively easy to explain. Justice in our legal system means judging a person based on existing law and exonerating or punishing accordingly.
Laws in the current system, however, can themselves be judged by more fundamental moral principles, such as by identifying whether the laws violate or support individual rights. Thus, we can also judge what should be law in a proper, more rational capitalistic society, then praise or condemn based on projected law. Big businesses, for example, may be praised for all of the wealth they create, rather than condemned by the non-objective regulations, as happens today.
Definitions or at least descriptions of justice in the moral sense abound in the Ayn Rand literature. Let’s examine several.
Rand in The Virtue of Selfishness (p. 26) writes “that one must never seek or grant the unearned and undeserved, neither in matter nor in spirit.” But aren’t earned and deserved synonyms of, or closely related terms to, justice?
In Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology (p. 51), she writes that justice is “the act of judging a man’s character and/or actions exclusively on the basis of all the factual evidence available, and of evaluating it by means of an objective moral criterion” (Rand’s emphasis). This does not include the component of acting in relation to the person being evaluated. Note that justice is itself a moral value and virtue that requires other more fundamental moral values and virtues as criteria by which a person is to be judged, for example, “That person was not honest with me!” Justice is derivative from those other values.
Leonard Peikoff (p. 276) does mention the acting component: justice means “judging men’s character and conduct objectively and . . . acting accordingly, granting to each man that which he deserves” (Peikoff’s emphasis). But, again, isn’t “deserve” a synonym of justice? And we might also ask what does acting accordingly mean?*
Galt’s speech in Atlas Shrugged (p. 1019) implies justice means “that every man must be judged for what he is and treated accordingly, that just as you do not pay a higher price for a rusty chunk of scrap than for a piece of shining metal, so you do not value a rotter above a hero.” Galt here is speaking in elegant, dramatic terms about the principle of trade, which indeed seems to be an acting component of justice.
Rand (p. 31), finally, drives the point home: “The principle of trade is the only rational ethical principle for all human relationships, personal and social, private and public, spiritual and material. It is the principle of justice.” Trade is an action, so it seems to be the acting component we are looking for.
Let us now try to sort out from these various statements what justice is and concisely state its genus and differentia.
As in the legal system, justice is a judgment, which means identifying facts about the person in relation to a standard. And as in the legal system, justice calls for action in relation to the person judged. Thus:
Justice is the value and virtue of accurately identifying facts about oneself and others and comparing those facts to the standard of what is beneficial or harmful to human life as a rational being, then when rationally appropriate engaging the others by exchanging value for value or rejecting any such exchange, which can include punishment.**In short, justice means accurately judging and—when rationally appropriate—praising or condemning. (“Oneself” must be included in the formal definition because we can be just or unjust to ourselves.)
“Value” and “virtue” is the genus, judging and acting in a certain way is the differentia. The qualification of “when rationally appropriate” must be included because we judge people, events, businesses, and governments all the time, but do not have a “duty” to praise or, especially, to condemn them. Much of the time we are not even close to the person being judged, such as a talking head on cable news! And as I often told my students—when judging people we are close to, including ourselves, or when judging events, businesses, governments, and talking heads—be sure to dig, dig, dig for the facts. “Do you have all of them?” I would ask.
One final moral concept of justice must be mentioned and dispensed with: social justice. I have defined it as the virtue of “accurately judging oppressed classes as underprivileged and granting them restitution” with a variety of handouts taken from those who are morally competent and successful (Applying Principles, p. 96). In other words, from those who have earned their wealth and property. Social justice is the moral, and by extension, legal concept of collectivist victimology.
What it really means is to take from the alleged thieving rich and give to the alleged underprivileged poor. It is a dishonest concept and is therefore unjust!
* “Fairness” is another word that is often thrown in when discussing justice, but it, too, is a synonym.
** “Exchanging value for value” is the general meaning of trade, but it is important to note that in economics and business “trade” has a narrower meaning: the buyer values the product more than the money paid and the seller values the money received more than the product sold. In the more general moral sense of the term, the exchange is still a value-for-value trade.
