In Our Name by Beerbohm Eric

Author:Beerbohm, Eric
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781400842384
Publisher: Princeton University Press

erect[] just institutions whose just-making features are independent of the pattern of people’s decentralized choices from the remaining available spaces of individual action. With institutions of that kind locked in, people can press their own agendas knowing that justice is sustained however they choose from their spaces.20

Let us leave aside whether this is an accurate reading of justice as fairness.21 The partition account promises citizens cognitive and material savings. The costs that we would shoulder to secure justice can largely be outsourced to egalitarian institutions. This passage reads Rawls as claiming that this division promises to allow individuals the ability to “externalize the burdens of attention to justice.”22 This statement needs qualification. Perhaps the thought is that citizens need only episodically shoulder concerns of justice directly—namely when they exercise their decision-making powers. When we aim for one basic structure over another, we put away the strategy of externalization. The best-known rationale for this divide is the simple thought that unlike individuals, institutions don’t have lives of their own to lead.23 So institutional agents can be entrusted to display impartial concern.

Separation of this purest kind is overstated. State institutions lack self-concern because we invent them and, through decision-making structures, shape their content. They are our instruments, nothing more. Liam Murphy suggests that the payoff of this partition, if successful, is a “less intrusive, and in that sense less demanding” conception of justice from the standpoint of the citizen.24 Presumably political agents—both flesh-and-blood and institutional—can work together to secure justifiable distributions so that individuals, in their market choices, can be motivated by local concerns. Partition views hold that we are free to engage in some amount of partial striving so long as impersonal institutions guarantee a reasonably just society through the character of their policies.

Perhaps this kind of space clearing is analogously provided by a system of representation. Representative agency allows for significant freedom in our mental lives. Without revision, however, the partition view does not carry over to the domain of democratic decision making. In the former, distributive case, citizens supply the proper terms for their institutional agents, who implement those terms. For analogous freedom we would need to offload decision making to proxy agents, “locking in” officials who respond to problems of policy choice. The idea is to transfer moral reflection about public policy to a political agent—one whom we accord a measure of deference on reasoning about justice and law making. Perhaps this unnamed agency relationship is already embedded in democratic life.

I have argued that citizens should conceive themselves as sovereign over their basic principles of justice. Suppose, however, that many citizens cannot produce fully worked-out principles of this kind. Consistent empirical evidence suggests that most citizens fall into this camp.25 Are they in violation of the deliberative virtue of independence and integrity?26 The model of the philosopher-citizen possessed something akin to a “grand revolutionary’s complete handbook.”27 She could tell us how to choose among any policy choice, however far away from the conditions of the world she found herself in.

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