The Two Faces of Justice

Jiwei Ci, The Two Faces of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006), xii + 253 pp.

Reviewed by Lawrence C. Becker  (Hollins University)

This is a superb philosophical essay. It is elegantly written, imaginative, surprising in ways both large and small, carefully thought through, and embedded in generous readings of other work on justice. It is also deep in many respects-deep in the sense that it regularly uncovers unfamiliar connections between familiar ideas, and brings those connections into focus as central features of the theory and practice of justice.

The two faces problem: conditional motivation and unconditional commitment

The book is not intended to be a novel theory of justice, or a comprehensive treatise on the subject. It is rather a carefully structured and persistently pursued meditation on the connection between justice and reciprocity, as well as on the moral psychology that defines both a central problem for a theory of justice, and the all-too-human limits of the problem' s resolution.

The central problem that Ci points to is an apparent contradiction-one that has implications for the conception of justice, the justification of its norms, and the possibility for developing a stable disposition to follow those norms. He says:

As its title indicates, the main argument of the book is that justice has two "faces": the conditionality of interest and the unconditionality of morality. By the conditional face of justice I mean that the disposition to be just includes the willingness to follow certain norms, as defined in a given conception of justice, provided that other members of the relevant group act likewise. This conditional willingness reflects a principal aim of justice, namely, the reciprocal satisfaction of interests. It distinguishes justice from unconditional virtues [e.g. benevolence] on the one hand and from (rational) egoism on the other. But justice also has another face. Since no system of justice can rest securely on the basis of a general understanding of justice in terms of conditional motives and imperatives, the institution of justice exists to remove conditionality from the human willingness to be just, and thereby to counteract the otherwise contagious nature of breaches of justice. This means that justice has to be sustained through the social creation of unconditional imperatives and of a corresponding unconditional virtue of justice. (5)

The tasks Ci sets for himself here are difficult ones. For one thing, he obviously needs to persuade people who reject mutual advantage accounts of justice that they are mistaken. For another, he needs to persuade people who reject the practical necessity of unconditional imperatives and motives that they too are mistaken. He must do those things in order to have his "two faces" premise. But then he wants to make a constructive argument as well. He says:

In this book, ... I aim to develop an account of justice that captures the conditional nature of the disposition toward justice and at the same time makes sense of the way in which justice requires the character of an unconditional imperative and an unconditional virtue. Such an account has to begin by understanding justice in terms of the conditional motives that are present in, or implied by, the circumstances of justice. It then has to render a plausible account of the social transformation of those motives into unconditional ones, a transformation that constitutes a qualitative leap from the circumstances of justice. (5)

Like a good deal else in the introductory chapter, these paragraphs are alarming. Midway through the chapter, one is likely to have accumulated a variety of vexed objections and counterexamples, which then grudgingly give way to an appreciation of the subtlety and precision with which Ci writes. In almost every case, when he develops a point adumbrated in preliminary remarks, one eventually sees that the obvious objections have been appreciated and confronted, and have actually been neatly avoided in the preliminary remarks themselves.

In my judgment, Ci is fascinating and successful in establishing the centrality of reciprocity to any plausible account of justice. Of course, in my case he has the attention of someone who already agrees with this part of his conclusion, albeit for different reasons. But his reasons may well have wide appeal to people who remain resistant to mutual advantage accounts of justice-especially when he is engaged in an insightful examination of the reactive attitude of resentment. Ci is less convincing, I believe, though equally fascinating, about the practical necessity for unconditional imperatives and motives.

I cannot hope to represent his complex arguments adequately here. But this brief outline, together with a few observations, will give a sense of their nature and strength.

The conditionality of justice: reciprocity

Many layers of observation and argument throughout the book make a powerful case for thinking of justice in terms of reciprocity. Justice is understood to be an intermediate virtue, somewhere "above" thoroughgoing egoism, and somewhere "below" pure or impartial benevolence. One can easily see how reciprocity defines such an intermediate region, with its normative insistence on conditional social arrangements-arrangements to which each adheres only provided that (enough) others do likewise to make it possible to realize the mutual benefits of cooperation and to avoid the self-defeating damage of being exploited.

The attractive possibilities of such conditional social arrangements yield a powerful motive for organizing a large portion of social life in terms of reciprocity. Moreover, both egoism and impartial benevolence, when rationally constrained so as to make egoists relatively enlightened and altruists properly self-protective, move from different directions right up to the boundary of reciprocity. What we need is a way of understanding why the rational egoist would cross the boundary and genuinely endorse mutual advantage, rather than merely appearing to do so while reserving the right to ride free when possible. And we need a way of understanding why the rationally benevolent impartialist would cross the boundary from the other direction and insist upon mutually beneficial relationships rather than, for example, the single-minded pursuit of aggregate welfare.

Ci is well aware of the standard arguments for getting egoists and altruists to endorse the importance of justice as reciprocity. But he is aware, also, that these arguments immediately raise questions about the characterization of the circumstances of justice. He has his own illuminating discussion of that topic, which I will not describe here. But he also begins the book with an intriguing argument drawn from analytic moral psychology-one that is designed to show that an implicit endorsement of justice as reciprocity is contained in our characteristic reactive attitude toward injustice.

Here is a flat-footed summary of his much more elegant argument. (Note: The term "ineluctably" occurs frequently in the text of the argument itself, not merely in this summary. It reflects the fact that Ci is giving an account of what he takes to be the logic of the moral psychology involved rather than merely its empirical reality. His inspiration for this way of proceeding is Peter Strawson' s book Freedom and Resentment.1)

(1) When we interact with each other over time, we ineluctably develop normative expectations of what others should do for us. And when others fail to meet our normative expectations, we ineluctably form reactive attitudes toward them-attitudes such as resentment and indignation. (Such reactive attitudes may properly be called moral attitudes when they are formed in response to impersonal normative expectations-that is, expectations of oneself for others, and of others for others, as well as expectations of others for oneself. Our reactive attitude toward our own breaches of such expectations may be guilt.)

(2) The normative expectations we mark off, conceptually, as having to do with our sense of justice and injustice are associated with the (moral) reactive attitudes of resentment, indignation, and guilt. These are moral attitudes because conceptually, we understand justice and injustice to involve impersonal normative expectations.

(3) But resentment is the central one of the three. Its presence is an identifying signal that we are reacting to something we perceive as an injustice, and it is our typical and primary reaction to perceived injustice in a way that indignation and guilt are not. They seem derivative by comparison. So the analytic moral psychology of the concept of justice must include the potential for the reactive attitude of resentment.

(4) Resentment ineluctably connects the concept of justice to the concept of reciprocity. One reacts with resentment, properly speaking, only to the extent that the violation of expectations involves (what one understands to be) a previously shared commitment to a norm of reciprocity-one in which we each have agreed to do our part provided others do the same. Harms that we receive from people who are incapable of understanding or making such a commitment, or from people who have refused to make it, cannot elicit resentment, properly speaking. This is an indication that no matter what concept or theory of justice is in play, a concept of reciprocity is a central part of it.

It is predictable from my own work on reciprocity that I prefer to rely on empirical psychology and social science rather than analytic moral psychology. I think the pervasiveness of norms of reciprocity over the whole of human history, and their practical necessity for robust, productive social life, are more than sufficient to ground normative judgments about reciprocity generally. And I think facts about human social behavior should also be sufficient to establish the centrality of reciprocity to theorizing about justice.

Yet many remain unpersuaded. So it is heartening to see this book's novel approach to the issue. It is, after all, a carefully controlled argument about concepts rather than an attempt to argue, on conceptual grounds alone, for a substantive moral principle. An appeal to a priori moral psychology in this case just might succeed in showing that the ordinary concept of justice is necessarily entangled with the concept of reciprocity. That would be a substantial achievement. Whether it would then do more than force a restatement of nonreciprocal theories of justice is an open question. It seems to me likely that nonreciprocal theories will simply continue under a different name, and continue to claim dominion over reciprocal ones. I worry also about some of the obvious weak spots in the argument just outlined.

But I am pleased to say that Ci's full version of the argument is much more subtle and plausible than my summary. And it is immeasurably more interesting.

The unconditionality of justice: noncompliance and enforcement

The second part of Ci's thesis is that while the basic motivation for committing oneself to the norms of justice is a conditional one, defined by the normative expectation of reciprocity, the practical success of such norms requires some form of unconditional commitment from us. Otherwise, he thinks, the norms of justice will be subject to serious instability - in the form of contagious noncompliance-whenever the normative expectation of reciprocity is damaged.

The real world is not a world of ideal or perfect compliance; it is a world of partial compliance. Ci thinks it is obvious that if our motivation to follow the norms of justice remains contingent on the reciprocal conduct of others, then noncompliance from a substantial number of them (at least when it touches us directly in an important way) will necessarily damage our own commitment to the norms of justice. And logically, it should do this, of course. A conditional commitment to justice is by definition one I keep only if the condition is met. Thus when it isn't met, my commitment evaporates by a simple modus ponens: "If I do not get reciprocity from (enough) others who are willing to do the same, then I will not conform to the norms of justice. I do not (now) get the necessary reciprocity. Therefore I will not conform to the norms of justice."

One can of course imagine that people initially commit to the norms of justice conditionally, but then internalize them in a way that makes them fully unconditional. And we certainly cannot deny that this happens at least at the conscious level. Many people come to regard their commitments to justice as absolute or unconditional in the important sense that they believe they would (or should?) never willingly endorse a failure to live by those norms under any conditions-even if it should happen that they in fact fail to act justly under duress or in extreme circumstances. Ci holds, however, that the conditionality of our commitment to justice is embedded in the very logic of our moral psychology. Thus his discussion suggests that we cannot ultimately erase the conditionality, but only at most repress awareness of it. Doing so, moreover, is perilous and likely to yield dangerous forms of infantile self-deception or fanaticism.

A reader might think, at this point, that the obvious solution is to give up the "two faces" idea in favor of an account of worldly wisdom and adulthood about the way reciprocity works-wisdom at a level that is very generally achievable by human beings in the normal course of development, and which keeps the commitment to justice stable as long as social life is reasonably predictable, safe, and productive. In fact, one might go on to consider the ways in which it is unconditional adherence to a conception of justice that spreads breaches of justice like a contagion. Rigidity and absolutism in a world full of uncertainties are dangerous forms of unconditional behavior, but there is nothing similarly dangerous about conditionality as such. It is not unsettling to have neighbors who make it plain that they will act very differently (in terms of obeying ordinary laws) if and only if the whole system breaks down - for example, during an apocalyptic age. In fact, wouldn't it be likely that a contagious willingness to be just would grow out of social behavior conditioned on reciprocity? Ci's response would be to argue that the two faces problem remains if we look closely at the way our commitments to justice operate.

Ci ultimately resolves the problem in a way some readers will have anticipated in their initial objections to Chapter 1, and in a way that introduces some of the multilevel complexity referred to in the previous paragraph. After all, people may zealously pursue apparently unconditional commitments within various social roles-as citizen, defense attorney, physician, or poet-and yet in reflective moments understand those commitments as having second-order contingencies. For the soldier, unconditional obedience to direct orders assumes the legitimacy of those orders. For the defense attorney, zealous advocacy assumes the existence of an equally zealous adversary and an impartial judge.

Ci describes the way in which people can successfully adopt and act upon what appear to be unconditional commitments to justice in their daily behavior as long as they live within a reasonably just and stable social order (or state). Such a social order or state secures some basic reciprocal social arrangements, effectively enforces enough compliance with them to create a form of justice as reciprocity, and effectively deals with the potential for resentment by punishing those who do not comply with just social arrangements. This preserves the basic conditionality of justice, but locates that conditionality in a second-order issue about the effectiveness of the social order or state. Thus the conditional face of justice shows itself only when the effectiveness of the state is in question. It represents one aspect of a powerful disposition or virtue of justice that is sufficient to trigger insurrection and revolution in a failed state, but which in a reasonably just social order remains causally latent and, for most of us most of the time, perhaps, outside the scope of our awareness. In daily life under ordinary conditions, at a conscious, unreflective level, it is the unconditional face of justice that we see in the mirror and present to others.

The Two Faces of Justice is a richly rewarding book.

Social Theory and Practice, Vol. 33, No. 3 (July 2007)