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Justice and Moral Bargaining

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 January 2009

Gilbert Harman
Gilbert Harman
Affiliation:
Philosophy, Princeton University
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Extract

INTRODUCTION

In my view, justice is entirely conventional; indeed, all of morality consists in conventions that are the result of continual tacit bargaining and adjustment. This is not to say social arrangements are just whenever they are in accordance with the principles of justice accepted in that society. We can use our own principles of justice in judging the institutions of another society, and we can appeal to some principles we accept in order to criticize other principles we accept.

To use David Hume's model of the relevant sort of convention, two people rowing a boat each continually adjusts his or her rate of rowing to the other so that they come to row at the same rate, a rate that is normally somewhere between the rate at which each would prefer to row. In the same way the basic principles of justice accepted by people of different powers and resources are the result of a continually changing compromise affecting such things as the relative importance attached to helping others as compared with the importance attached to not harming others.

Hume's rowers provide an example of a “convention” that is normally completely tacit. There are other models in which the bargaining can be more explicit, for example when a seller comes to set prices that are acceptable to customers, when employers reach understandings with employees concerning wages, or when political groups influence legislation.

I want eventually to consider the implications for moral reasoning and argument of the thesis that principles of justice are entirely the result of implicit bargaining and convention of this sort.

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Philosophy and Policy , Volume 1 , Issue 1 , Autumn 1983 , pp. 114 - 131
Copyright
Copyright © Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation 1983

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References

1 Kohlberg, Lawrence, Essays on Moral Developments, volume 1. The Philosophy of Moral Development: Moral Stages and the Idea of Justice (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1981).Google Scholar

2 I am indebted to Mark Johnston for suggesting this way of putting the issue.

3 Similar remarks apply to Nozick's, Robert discussion of what he calls the “value sanction” in Philosophical Explanations (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1981), 409–11.Google Scholar Nozick says that an immoral person is “worse off” than a moral person because his life is not as “valuable.”

4 Gewirth, Alan, Reason and Morality (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1977).Google Scholar

5 Chrsitopher McMahon gives an elegant account of various ways of understanding Gewirth's argument in a forthcoming paper, “Gewirth's Justification of Morality.”

6 Nagel, Thomas, The Possibility of Altruism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970).Google Scholar

7 Kohlberg, op. cit.

8 Kohlberg says that the principles accepted at stage six are the sorts of principle defended by Rawls, John in his Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1971).Google Scholar

9 Rawls, op. cit.

10 Ackerman, Bruce, Social Justice in the Liberal State (New Haven: Yaly University Press, 1980).Google Scholar Ackerman assures me that, in his view, it is actual dialogue that is important, not what might be said in certain hypothetical circumstances. This assurance is hard to square with Ackerman's book, which seems to be entirely concerned with what might be said in the hypothetical situation of constrained neutral dialogue. I await further elaboration.

11 Foot, Philippa, “Abortion and the Doctrine of Double Effect,” in James, Rachels (ed.), Moral Problems (New York: Harper & Row, 1971).Google ScholarThomson, Judith Jarvis, “Killing, Letting Die, and the Trolley Problem,” Monist 59 (1976).CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

12 I discuss some of these proposals in “Relativistic Ethics: Morality as Politics,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 3 (1980): 109–128.

13 See for example Singer, Peter, Animal Liberation (New York: Random House, 1975).Google Scholar

14 I am indebted to Antony Flew and Michael Gorr for helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.