What is Justice? Does it result only from human agreement, or is it based on a moral order that is greater than any of our political or social arrangements?  Before considering such questions, we need to be clear about what we are asking.  By asking what justice is, we are not posing a question that could be answered simply by looking in a dictionary (or asking ChatGPT).  This is not a semantic question.  This is a personal reality question: How are you going to live?  

In this respect, the question of whether justice is merely a social construct or is based on a human virtue that transcends any political order is intensely practical.  How you live is your answer to that question.  A person may live as though just actions are an instrumental good (a kind of perfected hypocrisy), or a person may live as though justice is to be pursued for its own sake, as an intrinsic good. In either case, your life will necessarily be an answer to this question.  

Each one of us embodies an answer to the question, “What is justice?” understood as “What is the best way for you to live your life?”  At least, that is the argument advanced through the characters who engage in debate in the first two books of Plato’s Republic.  I suggest that Plato’s text does more, however, than present arguments about justice: in fact, the poetic genius of these books is such that they anticipate every fundamental political or ethical disagreement you will witness, for example, the next time your extended family gathers for a holiday dinner.   

Ultimately, what these books of the Republic show readers is that, if justice does not transcend human social arrangements, then just action is reducible to either tyrannical compulsion or social deception.  As a result, the dialogue also poses, as we shall see, a question for inheritors of modern political life and thought, specifically regarding what we think a “social contract” does.  

In the first book of the Republic, Socrates considers four different attempts to give an account of justice.  Cephalus initially suggests that it consists of telling the truth and paying debts, but Socrates shows that it does not work as a strict definition because there are some instances where paying a debt could be unjust.  Polemarchus then proposes that justice consists of doing good to friends and harm to enemies, but Socrates shows him that a just action, properly understood, would never harm anyone (335e).  After this, Thrasymachus proposes that justice is whatever serves the advantage of those in political power (338d-341a).  This social constructivist definition of justice is further revised into a fourth and final claim when Thrasymachus explicitly says that the best way to live is, in effect, to practice injustice toward others if one can get away with it, by appearing completely just and virtuous (343a-344c).  The problem, however, is that Thrasymachus embodies a performative self-contraction, which apparently leads him to blush when exposed (350d).  In effect, if a person truly believed that the best life is that of a tyrant who appears virtuous, then such a person, for the sake of successful appearance (hypocrisy), would never reveal their tyrannical ambitions, the very thing that Thrasymachus has just done.  

This leads to the situation in Book 2 where the argument about justice being a social construct must be presented in the voice of “others” in order to avoid the performative self-contradiction into which Thrasymachus falls. In the second book, Glaucon explicitly challenges Socrates to show that justice is anything more than an instrumental good.  In presenting his challenge, he puts the claim into the voice of the many people (“they”) who see justice as a means to a kind of convenient social order:

They say that do to injustice is naturally good and to suffer injustice bad, but that the badness of suffering it so far exceeds the goodness of doing it that those who have done and suffered injustice and tasted both, but who lacked the power to do it and avoid suffering it, decide that it is profitable to come to an agreement with each other neither to do injustice nor to suffer it.  As a result, they begin to make laws and covenants, and what the law commands they call lawful and just.  This, they say, is the origin and essence of justice. (358e-359a)

The issue here is that, if justice is only a result of human agreement, then it must be only an instrumental good.  If just actions are only for the sake of some other purpose, such as pleasure or money or fame, then justice is not an intrinsic good.  As a result, in such an account, one would only practice the appearance of justice as long as it served that further purpose (whatever that purpose might be).  As Glaucon puts the challenge to Socrates, a social contract theory of justice will lead to the conclusion that one should become a tyrant (secretly at least) if one can achieve the benefits of merely appearing just long enough to get those benefits (342e-355d; 359c-376e).  Such instrumentality is woven into the very fabric of any account of justice that is based on a merely intra-human agreement.    

At this point, we need to distinguish, however, between what might be called a “social contract theory of justice” and a “social contract theory of sovereignty.”   The first of these accounts for the origin of justice—explained above.  The second of these is an account of the source of political rule—specifically, it involves the idea that political authority derives from a social contract, or agreement, between citizens and the state, sometimes referred to as the “consent of the governed.”  The crucial point to appreciate is that a social contract theory of sovereignty presumes that there is a natural moral order that transcends the state—something to which citizens can appeal when a state or ruler acts unjustly.  By contrast, the social contract theory of justice, as we have seen, denies that there is any moral order beyond the state.  In this sense, the two kinds of “social contract” are mutually exclusive.  

Why is this important to appreciate?  This distinction presents an especially acute problem for those who are inheritors of the political traditions that derive from John Locke and are, for example, famously mediated through the idiom of American founding documents. On the one hand, in his Second Treatise on Government, Locke often appeals to notions of natural law that presume there is a moral order above the claims of political authority.  On the other hand, he attempts to incorporate also into his account of the origins of political authority a version of the social contract theory of justice that would locate the origins of justice in mere human agreement.  I suggest that this is an unresolved issue in John Locke’s account of “nature”—alternating between presenting it as a source of both moral order and social chaos—a chaos remedied only by entrance into civil society.  Thus, when we appeal to a notion of “social contract,” we need to be careful to ask, “Am I referring to an account of sovereignty (rooted in natural law), or am I assuming that justice is merely a result of human agreement?”  

Phillip J. Donnelly, PhD, is Professor of Literature for the Great Texts Program in the Honors College at Baylor University.  He is the author of The Lost Seeds of Learning: Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric as Life-Giving Arts.

 

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