Justice, Relativism, and Democracy

The search for the content of justice and the tools capable of compelling assent through the unforced force of the better argument is something akin to the search for the Holy Grail. Or, in Harry Potter's world (at least in the British edition), it is something akin to the search for the Philosopher's Stone. It is the counterpart in political philosophy to the search for foundations in modern epistemology. Put simply, it is a quest to establish a conception of justice that is not open to the charge of relativism.

It must be said at the outset that this charge takes many different forms and different people mean different things by the charge of "relativism." But the gist of the charge is that accounts of justice are not grounded in anything objective, absolute, or universal to which all rational agents must assent but are, rather, merely the result of choices motivated by preference. To the question, "Can we establish a conception of justice that is impervious to such charges?" the answer is no. This charge, in some formulation or another, will always be available, and no formulation of the problem of justice will compel assent.

In various ways, some of those who follow Immanuel Kant, John Rawls, and Jürgen Habermas have sought to develop positions that will defeat the charge of relativism, at least in theory. In my view, none of these efforts is adequate to the task for a variety of different reasons, which I will explore below. One strategy for dealing with this setback is to revisit questions concerning who has the burden of proof in these debates. And while I am convinced that, for the most part, the relativists have done the better of job of saddling opponents with the heavier burden, and that these burdens could be profitably revisited, I nonetheless think that the better course is to give up, for the most part, efforts to legitimize one's account of justice in the eyes of the relativist. Why? Because the opportunity cost is just too high. There are too many more important things to focus on that can contribute to creating a more just world. I will develop my reasons for this conclusion toward the end of the essay, but let us start with a closer look at the efforts so far to defeat the relativist. I should note that I do not claim that the philosophers discussed understood their work primarily as a response to relativism, only that their philosophies have been taken up for this purpose.

Kant

Kantians show that some ethical positions are irrational because they involve the agent in maintaining claims that are self-contradictory. In the Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals ([1785] 1993), we learn that we should not confuse ethics with anthropology or psychology. Ethics is not a mere report on the social norms of this or that culture, as Aristotle's "ethics" largely appears to be. Rather, ethics is based on universal reason, not emotion or desire. So part of the test for whether or not a maxim, such as "one should not break promises," is a candidate for an ethical system is whether or not the maxim can be appropriately universalized—that is, could all rational agents will the maxim to be a universal law of nature without involving themselves in a contradiction? If so, then the maxim could properly be part of an ethical system, and if not, it must be rejected. An individual who sought to universalize a maxim such as "it is fine to break promises whenever you can make money" would run into the problem that in universalizing the maxim he would have to will at one and the same time (i) the background practice of promise keeping that will enable his strategic behavior of breaking the promise and (ii) that all rational agents can will the maxim that it is fine to break one's promise for monetary gains as a universal law. Of course, in a world where everyone willed (ii) and acted on it, there would be no (i), or at the very least there would be...