Conceptualizing Politics

JUSTICE AND SOLIDARITY

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176  Ethics and politics
theorist, John Rawls, as well as some of his critics. What solidarity means and why 
it is worth being taken seriously is explained in §3.
1.   Versions of justice
In the history of Western political philosophy, justice started her brilliant career 
in Plato’s Republic, in which 
δικαιοσύνη/dikaiosune
2
 is argued by Socrates not to 
be ‘what is useful to the strongest’ (Plato BCE 380, Book 2, 338c), as the Sophist 
Trasimachos in his scepticism or nihilism would have had it, but rather to consist 
of ‘giving to each what is owed to him’. This very same principle ‘unicuique suum 
tribuere’ will be crucial in Roman law, in particular as highlighted by the jurist 
Ulpian (AD 170–228), along with the other principle ‘naeminem laedere’/do not 
inflict harm on anyone. Starting with Plato, s/he who raises the question of justice 
looks at the existing power structure with critical eyes and asks it to justify itself 
with regard to criteria that are neither self-centred nor utilitarian or  opportunistic – 
yet modern utilitarianism is itself a theory of justice having the wellbeing of the 
greatest possible numbers of persons as target. Questioning power in the name of 
justice (but also liberty or equality or solidarity) means putting its legitimacy to the 
test, as we anticipated in Chapter 2, though we cannot here unfold in its entirety 
the connection between political legitimacy and normative categories.
Now, a first criterion useful to put order to the many versions of justice is to 
distinguish substantive from procedural versions. The former understand justice as the 
conformity of our acts, laws, political regimes to substantive values such as equality 
in one of its several meanings or to those enshrined in a cosmic order or belong-
ing to what we regard as natural order – as is the case with natural law theories. 
In common parlance, particularly in Europe, ‘just’ is often by default merged with 
‘equal’ or ‘egalitarian’.
Procedural versions avoid the identification with substantive, hence controversial 
and evolving values, and strive for a higher degree of generality by seeing justice 
realised in the application of a rule of behaviour that is applicable to all concrete 
cases. The drawback with these versions lies in the often empty abstractness and 
fungibility of some formulas such as unicuique suum, which leaves open which rule 
(and which value system) should be followed in order to identify what is owed to 
each. This found a macabre confirmation in the German version of this principle 
Jedem das Seine being used by the Nazis as a menacing maxim engraved on the iron 
gate of the Buchenwald death camp.
A different story regards another procedural principle we have already met back 
in Chapter 7 where we discussed our normative attitude towards global/lethal chal-
lenges: the Golden Rule. In the Old Testament this principle is formulated nega-
tively ‘and what you hate, do not do to any one’ (Tobit 4:15); from the Gospels let 
us choose the positive formulation given in Luke 6:31 ‘and as you wish that men 
would do to you, do so to them’. The transcultural nature of this rule is proven by 
its likely origin in India and its presence in Confucianism; its interpretations range 
between do ut des reciprocity (a favour for a favour, or the other way around: do not 
excite others to perform tit-for-tat) and universal respect for every person’s dignity. 

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Justice and solidarity  177
In this second reading, it comes closer to Kant’s categorical imperative in its second 
formulation, as quoted in the previous chapter (cf. Kant 1785, 36). Let us note that, 
properly understood, these principles regard relations between individual persons, 
not communities or polities. It is therefore an unduly simplification to apply them 
directly to political relationships, except we are determined to deny any autonomy 
to politics and want it to be – as Kant wanted – an application of moral laws to a 
field whose nature can however be deemed to be very different from morality.
Let us now look at another classification of justice: commutative/retributive and dis-
tributive. The first elements of this distinction were laid down by Aristotle in Book V  
of Nicomachean Ethics. Commutative justice tells us to burden people (with a fine, or 
a prison term) in a way proportional to their wrongdoing; or to compensate them 
for the harm they suffered or the commendable acts they performed in a measure 
that matches their loss or performance. This type of justice is aimed at regulating 
the exchange between evils or goods. As such, it does not entail an entire scheme 
of political cooperation for society, but addresses primarily two cases of such an 
exchange: civil and criminal justice (tort law and penal law) and the wage system. 
In the first case we speak of retributive justice if the justice system focuses on the 
retribution for the wrong done that can be claimed by both victims and the state. 
It is, however, known that a justice system based only or primarily on retribution 
fills prisons to the utter limit, as in the USA since the mid 1990s, but is unlikely to 
lead to a permanent crime reduction; re-education – or rehabilitative justice – as 
the primary aim of the sentence works better.
As to the wage system, the point rather regards the capitalist system as presum-
ably the cause of an unjust distribution of the goods produced by social coop-
eration, or exploitation. This used to be, and still is, a widespread feeling, but its 
classical formulation was given some 150 years ago by Karl Marx (1867) in the first 
book of Das Kapital, Chapter 4, §3. What appears to be a fair exchange between 
the wage-labourers offering their labour-power and the capitalist rewarding them 
with an amount of money corresponding to what the labourers and their family 
need to survive is only illusion, because, in fact, the capitalist lets the workforce toil 
for a much longer time and makes a profit out of this. In the sphere of produc-
tion, in the factory, the illusion of a fair exchange born in the sphere of circula-
tion on the job market vanishes. This classical explanation, meanwhile abandoned 
by most economists, was presented by Marx as a further development within the 
labour theory of value initiated by Adam Smith (1723–1790) and David Ricardo 
(1772–1823). It found an extension in Arghiri Emmanuel’s (1911–2001) theory of 
the unequal exchange between developed and developing countries in the capitalist 
world economy. The political outcome of these theories of social and international 
injustice were revolutionary and anti-imperialistic movements.