Justice: All-Encompassing or Subject to Moral Override?

Abstract

Is justice all encompassing? And, if not, how does it fit within the domain of morality? Or, else is that which lies beyond the realm of justice also fall outside that of morality? These questions are pressing to pluralists who recognize that in contemporary polities there are deep divisions owing to the proliferation of conflicting conceptions of the good. Departing from this realization, this essay examines three classical types of theories of justice, respectively the Aristotelian, the Kantian, and the Humean which casts justice in terms of social utility. In Aristotle’s conception, justice is coextensive with the virtues and morality, and is conceived in connection with a vision of human beings as political beings with a common purposive design. In the Kantian conception, the realm of justice becomes detached from that of the good, whereas according to Hume what is not within the purview of justice lies beyond the realm of morals. None of these three types of theory suits the contemporary pluralist. The essay argues that to overcome the problems posed by the latter theories, pluralists should embrace a conception of justice susceptible of being overridden by a pluralist morality.