A Study Of The Justice Paradigm Of Liberalism

The justice paradigm of liberalism is filled with a good many of debates anddemonstrations of freedom and equality, right and utility, morality and politics, apriorityand experience, interest and reason, hypothesis and reality, and logic and inference.According to Brian Barry’s analysis methods of justice theories, we should analyze thejustice paradigm of liberalism through four factors–subject, environment, institution andnorm, which contains important contents of the justice theory of liberalism. In subjects,the conflict and entanglement between self-interest and reason, the two sides of humannature, make the priority of rights and good the focus of the justice theories of liberalism.Nobody could deny the political and philosophical proposition of “justice priority” in anycase. Environment is the basis of human existence. The shortage of resources becomes animportant premise for justice. Without it, there would be no competition for interests andrational cooperation. However, whether the resource environment is changing fromsufficiency to deficiency or it is deficient at the very beginning cannot be separated fromdifferent hypotheses on “state of nature”. Thus, human society can be divided into privateand social spheres in order to handle different human relations with a differentenvironmental beginning. Institution imposes restrictions on man and his environment, asa restriction on freedom. Institution prevents human nature and environment frominjustice resulting from unlimited freedom. Different modes of liberalism give differentanswers to the question whether institution is to protect or restrict individual rights, soit’s necessary to define individual rights and man-to-man cooperation. Justice can beguaranteed by a state system based on social contract or derived from direct priorexperience. Norm is used to distinguish justice from injustice. Freedom and equality arethe theme of justice as well as the main norm for justice evaluation. Aristotle firstly used“appropriateness” as the valid criterion for justice. In fact, appropriateness is a restrictionon the two extremes, rendering equality the core of justice. Since then, justice has seldomdeviated from the theme. While looking for the first principle of justice, liberalismregards individual rights as the initial cause, and individual rights becomes the content ofthe justice theory of liberalism. The factors of the justice theory of liberalism are historical. In other words, thefactors have different theoretical trends in different historical periods. From manito toindividuals and then to group level justice, the human basis of justice subject makes itpossible to build the theoretical system of justice. Equality and freedom become thetheme of the justice theory of liberalism and the content for its theoretical framework.From God to man, justice has gradually returned from explicit stipulation to man itselfand freedom has become a human demand as well as the first principle to demonstrate tobe a man. Therefore, the birth of liberalism is a natural result of developments of thejustice theories.With the solution of freedom and equality in the developments ofliberalism from classical liberalism to utilitarianism, new classical liberalism andneo-liberalism, deontology, teleology, apriorism and empiricism have been used indifferent theoretical systems. The historic nature of justice factors determines the divisionof the liberalism development into several stages, which contain classic theories in eachstage.Following the evolution of liberalism, we may make a comment on the fourparadigms of the justice theory of liberalism on the basis of the classification ofliberalism. The four paradigms are significant to the study of the justice paradigm ofliberalism, especially to that of the justice theory of Marx. The four justice paradigms aredistribution of property, negative rules, mutual advantage and the paradigm of fairnessand justice. Classical liberalism believes that government should protect individual rightsfrom violation, which has gained support from traditional liberalism represented byLocke and new classical liberalism represented by Hayek in different periods.There is something in common between Locke’s “rights following natural rights”and Hayek’s “law under inner law”. The difference between them lies in the form ofgovernments in different times. Kant, a revolt against classical liberalism, lays the basisfor neo-liberalism. Rawls, the representative of neo-liberalism, thinks that reason shouldserve freedom, believing rational freedom should be exercised under the constraint ofnatural law. Rawls’ deontology is experimental. His view on idea, justice environment,principle, stability and social structure is in conflict with Kant’s. However, Rawls’ designis aimed at utilitarianism, which is generated by absorbing political and economictheories of classical liberalism. The two principles of utilitarianism, equal utility and utility maximization, are not paralleled, both pursuing the principle that the maximizationof social effects is the norm of justice. In this sense, it deviates from fairness and justicebecause it stresses result while justice emphasizes procedure.The above analysis paves the way for Marx’s notion of justice. Although Marx hasnot made much argumentation on justice, he is not against justice. A profound surveyshows that he completes his own construction of justice by criticizing capitalism. Marxcriticizes capitalist justice based on freedom and equality. Capitalist justice, which isrelated to the justice theory of liberalism turns freedom from form to substance and dealswith the problem of equality in reality. In subdividing the concept of justice, humannature, object, institution and norm form the four factors of the justice theory ofliberalism, which are also the basic structure of capitalism. Marx criticizes such factors asnon-freedom and inequality in capitalist justice. He believes that the capitalistimprovement and amendment of justice has not accomplished a radical and substantiveconstruction of justice, pointing the necessity of abolishing the private system inachieving substantive justice. By analyzing Marx’s notion of justice, comparing with theparadigm of the justice theory of liberalism and identifying its basic factors, thedissertation is to illustrate Marx’s justice paradigm of social criticism and the differencesfrom the paradigm of the justice theory of liberalism.