The Meaning of Justice

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.

Further Comment on Galileo’s Middle Finger

My previous post did not do justice to the Alice Dreger book Galileo’s Middle Finger. Here are a few additional comments.

Intersex people. Intersex infants, children, and adults, formerly referred to by the pejorative “hermaphrodite,” are born with ambiguous genitalia—for example, with external penis and vagina, usually of different sizes, or with an external vagina and internal testes but no uterus or ovaries.

Dreger’s doctoral dissertation focused on late nineteenth and early twentieth century hermaphroditism. Because such sexual differences were seldom ever talked about, most intersex people in that period lived relatively normal lives, presumably because they assumed that everyone else was built the same way. As Dreger put it, perhaps a little surprise on the doctor’s face when examining the patient was the only awareness anyone had of the medical issue!

Sometime during the twentieth century, doctors decided they should do something about the “shameful” condition. They decided, usually only telling the parents that some infant surgery was necessary, to play God and change intersex infants into boys or girls, based entirely on their judgment of which way the infant should go.

In recent times, it seems doctors have become more transparent by telling parents what they are doing . . . but rarely, even today, have doctors or parents told their patients and children what was done to them as infants.

“Shame, secrecy, and lies” is how Dreger describes the attitudes and behavior of doctors and parents. And it is this shame, secrecy, and lying that has incensed the human sexual identity activists. Intersex people are individuals with rights just like everyone else, but they have been denied honesty, have been discriminated against, and even denied choice—over which way they want to go, or whether to go at all.

Several early chapters of Dreger’s book detail her own activism to get the medical profession to fess up and change its ways. The stone wall she hit is part of the reason she felt the depression mentioned in my previous post.*

Congenital adrenal hyperplasia. Another stone wall was hit and described in the latter chapters of Dreger’s book. A doctor in New York City has made a career of administering dexamethasone, a powerful steroid, to in utero fetuses to prevent the formation of ambiguous genitalia and other sexual anomalies that can result from this inherited disease.

Dreger tallied a number of problems with this medical practice and lobbied hard, but failed, to stop it. The off-label drug—many drugs are so used—must be administered before there is any evidence the fetus is developing in an anomalous manner.

Dreger’s math found that only one out of ten such treated fetuses stood to benefit from the drug. On the other hand, the risks? Only one study—and only one—has been conducted to discern long-term consequences. The findings of that study indicated a significant minority of the sample suffered retardation, memory difficulties, and growth disorders; as a result, the study was shut down.

The controversy centered around informed consent, much of which seems not to have been given, and bureaucratic approval to proceed with such a treatment.

At one point, charges of fraud for phantom research projects were brought up, but the whistleblower, like many operating in bureaucratic environments, was attacked and threatened with psychiatric treatment. The Feds, responsible for protecting the public from risky medical practice, did little to stop a prestigious and well-established doctor.

Dreger lost the battle.

Social justice. Dr. Dreger views herself as an activist fighting for social justice. This has pushed me to clarify in my mind the difference between social and individual justice. “Social justice” has a long history, so it is not unique to Karl Marx, but today’s advocates use it in a distinctively Marxian flavor.

Is Dreger an advocate of social justice? Not really, though I’m sure she would disagree with my interpretation of her work.

Social justice, as I define it using today’s Marxian flavor, is the virtue of fairly and accurately judging oppressed classes as underprivileged and granting them restitution in the form of additional wealth, education, employment, along with other favors that they otherwise have not been able to attain. The underprivileged include anyone who is deemed unsuccessful, but especially African Americans, women, and LGBTs. This is the collectivist definition.

Individual justice is the virtue of fairly and accurately judging individuals—oneself and others—according to the standards of honesty, integrity, courage, independence, and especially productiveness. This is the individualist definition.

I think Dr. Dreger, because of her uncompromising commitment to facts, is closer to practicing the latter form of justice than the former. This, I would say, is why she could not accept her Marxist colleagues’ epistemological relativism. Yes, African Americans, women, and LGBTs have been badly discriminated against, even enslaved, but each individual must be judged on his or her own merits. No “class,” to use Marx’s terminology, owes any other “class” anything, especially when restitution is made at the point of a gun.

To use a reductio argument against the Marxists one might say this: Ayn Rand wrote that the individual is the smallest minority on earth. Turning the thought around, can we not say that the group or “class” of individuals is the largest “class” on earth? And therefore the largest “class” on earth that has been discriminated against and oppressed??

Individuals of the world should unite! And fight off their oppressers!!

Marxists should be advocates of individualism if they are seriously concerned about justice for the oppressed.

Free speech at Northwestern. An unwavering defender of First Amendment rights, Dreger has, since the publication of her book, performed a little flipping off herself. She has resigned from the Northwestern University Medical School over her dean’s attempts to censor the content of a faculty magazine she edited. The content? About sex, of course, but also possibly “offensive” content—to the hospital’s brand name!

Sigh! As a marketing prof, I have to make one last comment. Bureaucrats, whether in academia or government, have no clue what sound marketing, including branding, means. They think the usual BS that marketing is just that and that a brand image is something made up and pawned off on the helpless, unsuspecting public. This is just good Marxist thinking about business.

Sound branding—that is, product identification—of a first class hospital should run something like this.

We use the latest, most advanced knowledge and techniques to treat and cure our patients. In the process we entertain and examine all ideas—the wilder and more offensive the better.

The better because we will then know that we have left no stone unturned in order to come up with treatments and cures to do justice [there’s that word again!] for our patients.

*To the sheltered, like yours truly, this was an eye-opening read. It also struck me as the perfect “borderline case” in the philosophical problem of universals. The existence of intersex people (and animals) demonstrates that there is no intrinsic maleness or femaleness “out there, in the thing” as the intrinsic theory of essences claims. It also took my teenage daughter to explain the difference between gender, which is social (actually, psychological), and sex, which is biological. Now I understand!