Ontology and the Theory of Justice

Abstract

To what should theories of justice ascribe rights, goodness, justness, virtue, or utility? Answers, depending on the theory and on what is being ascribed, have included persons, selves, human bodies, institutions, and supra-individual aggregates such as nations. Some of these things, such as social aggregates, have been invoked to save particular philosophical positions against strong objections. Others, such as persons, have been used in raising those objections or in characterizing the distinctive qualities of some position. In this paper, I propose to explore, more systematically than is usual, the delicate relationship between the theory of justice and ontology. By ontology I mean scientific ontology: the things presupposed by empirical theories. I will ignore the controversies over the meaning and criterion of ontological presupposition (the classic statement remains Quine, 1976). Nor will I attempt to establish what an empirical ontology is, except to note by way of illustration that the existence of things such as rights or the Good is not at issue. The notion of a distinct scientific ontology may test the good will of those who are skeptical of the fact-value distinction (for my defense, see Grafstein, i98i). By the same token, a defender of the distinction may worry whether it is violated by an investigation of the normative bearing of scientific ontology. My own view is that so long as we recognize that any reasonable or relevant normative theory will incorporate factual assumptions about ontology and other matters, we see that normative theory is not pure and self-contained. A normative theory that responds to scientific insights need not bridge the logical gulf between facts and values because any normative theory worthy of the name already contains both elements. A further restriction on this investigation of the relation between ontology and the theory of justice is that it will proceed without relying on essentialism. By essentialism, I mean a view that some things exist in a deeper sense than others or that there is a fundamental distinction