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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 April 2024
Ideas of justice held by those who are continuously in possession of wealth are bound to be different from the ideas of those who are continuously out of it. The basic anxiety of the former is to ensure the stability of the profitable order by which they are enabled continuously to take possession; that of the latter is to escape from the disorder by which they are continuously dispossessed. There is no common moral order, no community of interest between rich and poor by which it might be said that justice consists in its preservation. In a society as unequal as that of Britain, the moral order is already something broken.
Theories of justice generated by possessors are concerned with stability, even if — as with liberal reformists — this can only be achieved by a wider spread of benefits. In other words, they are concerned to define and defend a partial community of interest in which the access to wealth of those who already have it is preserved while the poverty of those who don’t is explained and justified in general, if not in particular. So they always imply the presence of a moral order behind the existing social and economic one. Furthermore, possessors are likely to hold the restricted concept of justice (see previous article), favouring commutative and criminal justice and then such distributive justice as will fit with these. The dispossessed however, when they find the voice to talk about these things — which is rare — take naturally to the comprehensive view of justice which looks for a different order altogether. The “greater justice” of the gospels is the justice of the dispossessed.
1 Concepts of justice among moral philosophers are overwhelmingly those of the possessors. Hume, for instance, speaks for them when he founds property rights and obligations on the idea of justice, and justice itself on those conventions which people enter into “to bestow stability on the possession of those external goods, and leave everyone in the peaceable emjoyment of what he may acquire by his good fortune and industry. Treatise of Human Nature, Book III, part 2, section 2.
2 One such rare voice was that of Gerard Winstanley. Calling on the Commonwealth Government to honour its promise of freedom for all Englishmen, he says “… and we look upon that freedom promised to be the inheritance of all, without respect of persons. And this cannot be, unless the land of England be freely set at liberty from proprietors, and become a common treasury to all her children, as every portion of the land of Canaan was the common livelihood of such and such a tribe, and of every member in that tribe, without exception, neither hedging in any, nor hedging out.” See “A Declaration from the Poor Oppressed People of England”, in Winstanly, the Law of Freedom, ed. Christopher Hill, p 106.
3 As Cosmas Desmond points out, the acceptance of an idealist rather than a historical approach to political events paralyses our Christian judgment. Forms of injustice are ever new, but if we are wedded to an idealist notion of justice we will fail to see them when they are in front of our eyes. Instead of asking “What does the gospel tell us about this situation?” we should be asking “What does this situation tell us about our understanding of the gospel Christians or Capitalists? p 27.
4 In general, it is the use of capital, not its existence, which effects justice or injustice. But could there have been any primary accumulation without injustice.
5 One of the most acute observers of that phenomenon was Cobbett: This place presents another proof of the truth of my old observation: rich land and poor labourers. (Quoted by Raymond Williams in The Country and the City, p 137).
6 For a textbook example of this difference in freedom and the power of capital interests to disorder human lives, see The New Statesman report, “Lovely for some in the Garden”, 7 November 1980.
7 See, for instance, the recent study by Charles Medawar of the effects on citizens of Third World countries of large corporation advertising ‐ pushing products and a way of life which they cannot afford and which does them physical and cultural damage: Insult or Injury? An enquiry into the marketing and advertising of British Food and Drug products in the Third World, published by Social Audit, 1979.
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