Why Justice Comes First, And not Liberty (1
By Zeki Ergas (*)
Nothing straight has ever been
from the crooked timber of humanity
Immanuel Kant
The Anglo-Saxons lacking Grace
To win the love of any race
Hated by myriad of dispossessed
Of rights – the Indians East and West
These pirates of the sphere! Grave looters –
Grave, canting, Mammonite freebooters,
Who in the name of Christ and Trade
(oh, bucklered forehead of the brass!)
Deflower the world’s last sylvan glade.
Clarel
Herman Melville (2
I
Isaiah Berlin was probably right when he wrote that ‘The ideal society is not possible, because the three ultimate values (in it) -- perfect liberty, perfect equality and perfect justice -- are not compatible with one another at their ideal form.’ Berlin thought that was the case for the following reasons: (I)f perfect liberty existed, the strong would crush the weak; if perfect equality existed, then genius, creativity and productivity would be destroyed; and perfect justice is impossible because men are not omniscient (they are all we all know, flawed). Therefore, the scholar from Oxford concluded, ‘(T)he perfect society is not possible, not mainly unattainable, but inconceivable. Not only empirically but conceptually impossible.’ (3
So, we are left with the second-best option, which is a society that is as good as (humanly) possible. That is, a society in which prevail the highest possible levels of liberty, equality and justice. And that, in turn, means respecting (as much as it is humanly possible) human rights -- made up by political, economic and cultural rights. (4
In other words, we need the highest possible levels of liberty, equality and justice to build a human society which is as good as possible. That is a proposition that nobody would have a problem agreeing with. But what about these three essential elements, or ingredients, having an order of precedence, or priority? More simply put, does one come before the other? Or even: Is one the precondition of the other? Can we say (assuming, for the sake of the argument, that equality is part of justice) that liberty should come before justice? Or, can we take the opposite position, and say that, it is justice that should precede liberty? I shall argue in this essay that, in a world in which a significant minority of the world’s population (more than a billion people) suffers from extreme poverty, justice should come first, or that it is the ‘primus inter pares’ (‘first among equals’) of the two.
II
Berlin’s distinction between negative liberty and positive liberty is a good starting point. For the social philosopher, negative liberty has to do with individual freedoms, such as, the right to acquire wealth and property, for example. Globally these personal freedoms are described as ‘the search for the private good’. Positive liberty, on the other hand, is concerned with collective freedoms. Man recognises that he is ‘part of a whole’, and that seeking the ‘public good’ is to his advantage. And that is ‘the search of equality, justice and welfare’. Critics of the capitalist society have pointed out that the beneficiaries of negative liberty have been, largely, a ‘privileged minority’ which, moreover, may have acquired their ‘privileges’ by ‘exploiting the majority’. Berlin agrees and proposes that, to avoid ‘glaring inequality’, some negative liberty must be ‘sacrificed’ for the benefit of positive liberty. He asks rhetorically: What does the right to acquire wealth and property means to an Ethiopian starving to death?
So, there has to be a balance, an equilibrium between negative and positive liberties, between the private and public goods. How?
Berlin’s answer is: By giving the primacy to Reason. Aristotle teaches us, he explains, that we must ‘control our passions, emotions and desires, which can be harmful to the common good’. For the good of society the ‘common good’ must come before the ‘private good’. And what is the common good? For Aristotle, it is based on ‘moral, religious, intellectual, economic and aesthetic values’. ‘(P)ower should never be absolute,’ he wrote. ‘Only rights are absolute …That is our responsibility as human beings’. He also insisted that teaching the ‘primacy of Reason’ should be an intrinsic part of the curricula in the schools. (5
And what are these ‘moral, religious, intellectual, economic and aesthetic values’ that Aristotle wrote about? I present below a number of quotes taken from two of Aristotle’s major works, Ethics and Politics:
‘Just conduct is not easy, because it presupposes a virtuous moral state ...
Ownership of property is natural, but it should not be excessive ...
Wealth carries with it the responsibility of its public use ... The accumulation of wealth is just, but in moderate amounts, the desire for unlimited acquisition of wealth is bad ...
Inequality and injustice breed discontent. Discontent breeds instability ...
A democracy should be run by, and largely in the interest of, the poor ...
Most people suppose that it is sufficient to have a moderate amount of virtue, and so they set no limit to greed, i.e., to the pursuit of wealth, power, property, reputation, honours, etc. That is unfortunate ...
Justice is lawful, fair and equitable ... Universal justice has the same field of action as that of the good man ... Particular justice is either distributive or corrective ...
Money should not be handed out simply for the destitute to live on, it should be used to enable them to become independent.’
Amazingly, more than two millennia had to pass between the ‘Greek miracle’ and that of the ‘Age of Reason’ (also called the ‘Enlightenment’). After that things accelerated and the catastrophes of the two World Wars led to the adoption the by the United Nations, in 1945, of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Today, human rights have almost achieved the status of ‘What is believed everywhere, always, by everyone. (6 But, that’s the theory. The reality on the ground is a different matter: the majority of the world’s population continues to live under (to say the least) authoritarian regimes. The struggle for human rights remains one of the top challenges facing humanity today.
So, justice should come first, and not liberty. But what happens if the opposite is true? If liberty comes first. I believe, the American case study is instructive in that respect.
III
In America liberty comes first. The word ‘Liberty’ (in addition to the phrase ‘In God We Trust’) is found on all the American coins (from one cent to half-dollar; strangely it is absent on dollar bills, while ‘In God We Trust’ remains) -- the word ‘Justice’ is nowhere to be seen. The ‘Liberty’ written on the American coins appears to be, first and foremost, politically defined because America was for a long time a British colony. A parenthesis here to note that although liberty and freedom are often used as synonyms, the latter is used more frequently in the socio-economic context; it is, thus, ‘freedom to undertake’(a similar concept is ‘equality of opportunity’), and not ‘liberty to undertake’. Freedom to undertake as an aspiration and a right has a much larger acceptance in America than in the rest of the world, in Europe in particular. That acceptance has played in the past, and continues to play in the present, a significant role in the superiority of American creativity and productivity. (7 But there is a price to pay for this, which Americans are willing to pay. That price is, I believe, living in a country which suffers, despite the existence of a large (but dwindling) middle class, from more pronounced and (growing) inequalities than in Europe, for example. It can even be said that (in the philosophical sense, of course, and not in the legal sense) there is, relatively speaking, less justice, in the US, than, for example, in the Scandinavian countries. Undeniably, in the United States, pretty dismal poverty co-exists with indecently fabulous wealth; in 2003, some 13 per cent of the population, or some 43 million people, were living under the poverty line.
So, what’s happening to the ‘American Dream’? Is it still a ‘Dream’, or is it slowly turning into a ‘Nightmare’? As things stand today, owing to Globalisation which is bulldozing ahead, and, as a result, among others, China and India joining the ‘consumer society’, the ‘American Dream’ is bound, in the long term, to turn into a ‘Planetary Nightmare’. A related problem is that Americans have been, for a very long time, living beyond their means. The American deficit of the ‘current account’ (trade) keeps growing; it is more than US$ 600 billion a year presently. This is close to 5 per cent of the American Gross Domestic Product. How much longer will the rest of the world accept to finance the American insatiable thirst to consume? How much longer will the Chinese and the Japanese (and tomorrow the Indians?) be eager to buy American stocks and treasury bonds? Certainly, one day, sooner or later, the day of reckoning will come, and the world will be thrown into an economic crisis which could make the Great Depression look like small potatoes.
IV
To conclude. We need a better world than the one humanity has built until now. We need a world that is viable, and sustainable. In such a world, by necessity, I believe, justice must precede liberty, must be the precondition for liberty. Humanity has never been as rich as it is now; its wealth has increased tenfold in the last century on a per capita basis despite the more than quadrupling of its population, from 1,5 billion to 6,5 billion. It is shocking that, despite all that wealth, close to half of the world’s population must live with less than two dollars a day, and that every day 26,000 children must die of starvation and malnutrition. What makes these numbers even more appalling is that, in that same world, close to one trillion (one thousand billion) American dollars are annually spent on military budgets (about US$ 450 billion by the US alone) and US$ 400 billion, in agricultural subsidies in wealthy countries, while total international development assistance (IDA) to the poor countries is still less than US$ 100 billion a year. I have argued in a different essay that an historical debt exists, owed by the rich and developed countries of the North to the poor and underdeveloped countries of the South; and that, unless that historical debt is paid back (in part, given its magnitude, it would be impossible to reimburse it in full), humanity will not be able to build a ‘better world’, a viable and sustainable world. (8 So, let’s do it. Let us not prevaricate any longer. Gandhi correctly observed that an essential problem in the world in which we live is the ‘discrepancy’ between ‘word, creed and deed’. Building a ‘better world’ requires getting rid of that discrepancy. To save the world from a catastrophe ‘foretold’, what was forcibly taken (stolen) by the rich and developed countries of the North from the poor and underdeveloped countries of the South must be returned.
A remarkable conference was held recently at Yale University, entitled ‘Repairing the Past: Confronting the Legacies of Slavery, Genocide and Caste’. (9 The conference upholds the principle of reparation, or compensation, of African-Americans for the terrible wrongs suffered by their ancestors who were slaves. The debate revolves around two very important questions: What obligation does the present owe the past? And: Who or what decides the form and substance of the reparation? I present below a dozen or so of significant quotes from the papers presented at that conference:
‘Repairing the past involves a large number of interrelated and complex issues that have to do with history, memory and justice’.
‘Historical injustices can cast a long shadow.’
‘Aristotle (in Ethics) presents reparative justice as the restoration of a moral state of equality that was violated by injustice.’
‘If there are persisting ill effects of a wrongful action, and the perpetrator is in a position to rectify them in some measure, she ought to repair the situation in which she has placed the victim.’
‘This is not a matter of collective guilt but of collective responsibility; and reparation is not a matter of collective punishment but of collective liability.’
‘There are causal links between past oppression and present situation.’
‘Reparations are a limited means of “materially” repairing the effects of massive, systematic injustices.’
‘The central aim of the reparations movement is to help “the poorest of the poor” break the cycle of poverty and discrimination.’
‘Collective compensation is the responsibility of the US citizens as such.’
‘The American government which for a long time tolerated slavery and passed and enforced laws that supported it is responsible …’
‘Reparations harbor the potential of … reshaping our public memory and re-moralizing our political culture.’
These same principles could be applied to ‘settling an historical debt’: The rich countries of the North must return what they have forcibly taken from the poor countries of the South in four centuries or so of domination, exploitation an manipulation during the slave trade, colonialism et and neo-colonialism. Ultimately that is the only way to build a better world based on justice, equality and liberty for all. For that to happen, structural changes need to be made in the relations between the rich and the poor countries. Some of these changes are general and have to do with the major challenges to human civilisation; but others are specific and are concerned, precisely, with the relations between the rich and the poor countries.
The specific structural changes that need to made are:
A) The unconditional and immediate abolition of all debt owed by the poor countries;
B) A massive investment program in the economies -- agriculture, industry and services -- of the poor countries (a kind of Global Marshall Plan), the equivalent of one per cent of the rich countries Gross Domestic Product (GDP);
C) An international trade that would guarantee a decent income for the small farmers, workers and small businessmen of the poor countries; reversing thus the ‘unequal terms of exchange’ of the past;
D) Good governance, not only in the poor countries, but also in the rich countries. Corruption can be either grand or petty. The facilitators of grand corruption (the theft of billions of petrodollars in Nigeria, for example) are in the rich countries. Grand corruption simply could not exist without their collaboration. As for petty corruption, it is -- like the informal sector -- a means of survival in the poor countries; it tends to decrease with economic development.
The general structural changes needed to build a better world are:
I)The abolition of war as a means of international conflict resolution. War must be the solution of the last resort and the authority for waging it must rest with a world parliament or government. Ultimately, there should be only one army in the world controlled by an international institution.
II)The complete abolition of all nuclear weapons. And not only trying to stop their proliferation. As long as an exclusive club of countries arrogate themselves the right of having them, while refusing that same right to other countries (understandably an unacceptable position for those latter countries), nuclear proliferation will go on.
III) The establishment of national and international Ethical Authority (Committees of Wise Men, for example) with real powers. ‘Market’, ‘democracy’ and ‘liberalism’ are not absolute values. They can be manipulated, and, largely, are. Especially worrying are: the manipulation of information by media oligopolies controlled by a few ‘media barons’; and the (sex)-exploitation of ‘consumers’ by degrading and misleading publicity.
IV) Limits to wealth and income. Almost everything that has any value in life and the world has limits: joy and sorrow, pain and pleasure, happiness and despair.
A writer and a scholar, founder of the Millennium Solidarity Geneva Group (www.millennium-solidarity.net) and Vice-president of PEN Swiss Romand in charge of the Writers for Peace Committee (www.penromand.ch)
NOTES
1) This essay is part of a series. With it, the author tries to address the overall question of: How to build a ‘better world’? Some of the titles in the series are: ‘Settling an Historical Debt as a Prerequisite to a Better World’; ‘Why Civil Disobedience Campaigns Are Necessary to Eradicate Extreme Poverty in the World’; ‘Extreme Poverty, Extreme Wealth: Are the Two Linked?’; ‘No More War’; ‘Decline and Fall of the American Empire’; Women and a Better World; ‘Waging War on Corruption’ and ‘The Deterioration of Democracy: Has It Become a One-way Street?’. These essays, and some of the reactions to them, have been collected in a dossier. See: www.peacejournalism.com
2) See the review of: ‘Melville: His World and Work’ by Andrew Delbanco (Knopf, 2005); in New York Review of Books, Dec 1, 2005
3) Isaiah Berlin, ‘My Intellectual Path’, in New York Review of Books, May 14, 1998. Also two of Berlin’s well-known essays: Historical Inevitability’ and ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’.
4) Political rights include: a popularly elected government; the limitation of the powers of that government; and the temporary nature of the executive and legislative powers. Economic rights have to do with the satisfaction of ‘basic human needs’ – such as, food, health, education, shelter, work, clean air and safe water, the protection of the environment and the empowerment of women and children. Cultural rights involve the preservation of cultural diversity, by means of the promotion of their language and literature, and customs and traditions endangered by globalisation (or Western hegemony).
5) Berlin, ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, op. cit.
6) Quod ubique, quod semper, quod ad omnibus creditum est’. Quoted by Berlin, ‘My Intellectual Path’, op. cit.
7) The United States leads in the number of Nobel prizes won in science – physics, chemistry, medicine … – and in the number patents in innovations and technology.
8) See my essay ‘Settling an Historical Debt …’ in Note 1
9) The conference was organised jointly by the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition of Yale University, and the Brown University’s Committee on Slavery and Justice, on October 27-29, 2005.
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