Theories of justice

I want to end this part with some thoughts on the relationship between economic thinking and justice. In an earlier article I suggested that the exchange may have started to become dominant because it was the implementation of a particular system of justice, that of blood debt. If that were the case, then it could be that the justification of the entire modern economic model stems from this conception of justice. As you will have noted, I think this economic model has a suite of problems and that a different model - no-reciprocal gifting coordinated by giftmoots - would be far more beneficial. So if justice informs economic frameworks, and economic frameworks inform justice, what conception of justice would be most associated with a non-reciprocal gifting economy? The answer is likely non-reciprocal justice, which I call "justice as caring". I'll give a brief sketch of these ideas below.

Reciprocal justice

The main type of traditional justice that I think is present in liberal democratic societies is reciprocal justice. The name "reciprocal justice" has a few different specific theories that it can apply to, and I don't mean to dig too comprehensively into any of them at the moment, so I'll present a relatively simplified version, and then discuss how I think that this has become embedded in different parts of society. This type is often considered the "default" type of justice, and so there is some resistance, on occasion, to move away from it.

The basic premise is this: if someone incurs a debt, it is just to make them pay it.

This is fairly straightforward, but it does rely on some idea of what constitutes a debt, and the more broad that is, the more pervasive this particular style of justice is throughout society. I think there are two main examples:

• if someone causes damage, this incurs a debt
• if someone receives goods or services, this incurs a debt

The first is a pretty common notion of justice: that the victim be made whole by the perpetrator. So if someone steals or damages an item, they need to return the item or an equivalent value. It get's a little trickier when it is harm caused to a person, but the cost of healthcare or loss of work could determine the amount of reparations that are required. Two more complicating factors are the ideas of emotional harm and harm to society - not that either of these ideas is inherently problematic, but more that it becomes much more difficult to figure out how much is paid (in the context of emotional harm) or who it is paid to (in the context of social harm).

The second structures the economy. If someone receives goods or services, they need to pay. This is the basis for the exchange. And not only does this normalise the exchange, but it places some suspicion on those people who do not or cannot pay. Society becomes suspicious of welfare recipients, of stay-at-home parents, of the disabled, of the sick, and so on. That is, it is not about whether some works, but about whether someone pays, and this justifies the very wealthy have excesses and scrutinising the budgets of the disadvantaged. At its extremes it causes all sorts of odd situations, such as a person who receives medical care for an issue they didn't cause becoming bankrupt by the cost.

But I think that this sense of justice has gone beyond both of these areas, and into personal and interpersonal life. People see relationships as transactional. A person might put in a lot of work into a relationship and believe that this obligates their partner to reciprocate and, specifically, that they get to choose how their partner reciprocates. They see their partner as being in "debt" and think that this implies that the can choose the manner in which the debt is repaid. People apply accounting principles to romantic relationships. People believe that if the put in enough effort they are due some response, such as a man pursuing a woman and believing that the effort he put in should be reciprocated with some romantic (or other) activity. Parents have, in some exceptional stories, billed their children for the resources they put in to turning them into adults. Children squabble about how much work each put into caring for their parents and the closeness of their relationships when disputing the will.

There's also an inversion of the logic of this sort of justice. If paying a debt is a just obligation, and separates those who are just - and moral - from those who are not, then the ability to pay debts is seen as indicating a person is exceedingly just or moral. That is, the belief arises that people have earnt their money, and that people who have earnt more have some type of moral superiority. And even when this is disputed, there are still discourses where people with lots of wealth may not be considered moral themselves, but performing some incidental moral duty for society (such as creating jobs) or exemplars of the successful principles of the system in which this sense of justice is embedded (such as, for example, being smart or business savvy).

It will be no surprise that I think these extensions of reciprocal justice into further society are problematic - in fact, the general idea of reciprocal justice is something that I don't believe is overall beneficial for society. So, with that in mind, it is worth looking at other conceptions of justice.

Distributive justice

The main contender for an alternative is distributive justice. There are a number of different forms of distributive justice, so it can be hard to make a claim that covers all of them. However, each makes a proposal that resources should be distributed according to some logic, such as equality, need, or contribution.

So, for example, a system of distributive justice based on equality would attempt to distribute equal resources to everyone, while a system based on need would attempt to identify needs and distribute on that basis. We can see both of these at work in existing economies, though not as the central pillar. A distribution based on equality occurs in some cases where a natural resource (such as airwaves) returns a profit to the government and the proceeds are distributed to citizens equally. A distribution based on need occurs in a lot of different societies where welfare is paid to people based on specific identified needs, such as illness or disability. Some socialist systems are defined by some conception of distributive justice, such as the idea, "From each according to their ability, to each according to their need."

The main objections to these sorts of systems are objections about who defines what constitutes a need (or even a resource), and about the need for central planning. The first objection is that different definitions can produce outcomes that lead to gaps - that is, that a specific definition of need might leave someone without resources to give them a good quality of life because their conditions aren't defined as a need, or that a specific definition of resources might mean that there are some significant resources are not distributed because they are not considered a resource. The second objection is that central planning is problematic - that it can lead to forms of corruption, abuse of power, or chokepoints of information.

I think there is a different objection, which is that distributive justice doesn't necessarily have a clear conception of how to respond to crime or acts of harm. While reciprocal justice is largely focused on what happens after an act of harm has occurred, distributive justice largely concerns itself with concepts of how resources should be distributed without regard to acts of harm. For that reason, it is often paired up with some limited form of reciprocal justice.

Justice as caring

So what is the most appropriate conception of justice to accord with a non-reciprocal gifting economy? Intuitively, it should be a type of non-reciprocal justice. That would be distinctly different from reciprocal justice, where people incur moral debts and have to pay them back (often in monetary form). But it would also be different from distributive justice, where resources are distributed from some people to others by some third party (that is, through an act of requisition such as taxation, which is neither an exchange nor a gift). If we were to follow the non-reciprocal gifting logic, then people would receive justice when two parties voluntarily acted to do so, with no debt incurred by the "recipient" of justice toward the "gifter".

What does it mean to "provide justice" in such a context? In the conception of reciprocal justice it means putting someone back into the condition they would have been without the act of harm or effort. In the conception of distributive justice it means developing some concept of a share of resources, often to account for or offset some disadvantage. So one consideration is harm, and another is quality of life. And I think that by combing these concepts together, a possible concept of non-reciprocal justice emerges:

Justice is providing quality of life such that people are not harmed and do not commit harm.

This is an approach I call justice as caring. The idea is simply that we care for people, and in order to care for them we need their knowledge and consent to how they want to be cared for.

Firstly, this fits very neatly with a non-reciprocal gifting economy, as it parallels the way in which resources are transferred, and in addition one of the primary reasons that resources are transferred is to do with moral or social concern. I've written about how better economic conditions also assist with reducing crime.

But we can also go a little further. In addition to better economic conditions reducing the motivation for harmful acts, justice as caring would promote we create better social and psychological conditions to reduce the motivation for harmful acts. That is, by providing better healthcare, better mental health access, better narratives in society, more opportunities for self-expression and self-actualisation and less stressors in economic, administrative and social interaction, a wider variety of potential crimes and harms could be prevented.

The same reasoning would apply to people engaged in harmful acts. Most obviously, our job would be to care for the victims of such acts. But more controversially, justice as caring suggests that what perpetators need is care as well. The motivation for harmful acts has come from somewhere, and that needs attending to as a type of care rather than as a type of correction. That would mean putting more resources into benefiting perpetrators which would be, for many, a far less palatable position.

The point I am trying to make here is that even though this project is largely about an economic model, it is probably best not to treat the economy as entirely divorced from other social concerns such as justice, and that if we are to engage in radical change in one, it would be likely be hampered if we didn't also engage in radical change with the other. Otherwise there would be a tension between the economic model and the responses to justice that would probably cause a variety of problematic mismatches - such as whether we gift resources to perpetrators when we are expecting them to make people whole by discharging their moral debt.