Dr. Seuss and Philosophy - Jacob M. Held [112]
So, for Rawls, justice proceeds out of fairness. That is, we—as disembodied, rational persons—will recognize the inherent unfairness of certain principles of social organization and so not agree to them from under the veil of ignorance. In the original position, we will only accept principles that would be, if not to our advantage, at least not to our disadvantage were we to turn out to be at the bottom of the social hierarchy. If only the Sneetches had been so prescient.
Rawls generates two principles of justice from his thought experiment, “[That] each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive scheme of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar scheme of liberties for others . . . [and that] social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both reasonably expected to be to everyone’s advantage.”18 The just society for Rawls will include a social contract under which there are what we think of broadly as “civil liberties” held equally by all with the equal distribution among the citizens, and if there is any inequality in the socioeconomic standing, it must maximize the benefit to those least well off in the society. For Rawls, the social contract is not a matter of legitimacy of government gained by consent of the governed but instead what sketches out the necessary conditions for a just society of self-interested individuals.
A good society will promote justice among its citizens, but as philosopher Iris Marion Young (1949–2006) points out, justice is not “merely” a matter of fairness in the distribution of resources, rights, opportunities, and so forth, as laid out by Rawls. Rather, “Justice should refer . . . also to the institutional conditions necessary for the development and exercise of individual capacities and collective communication and cooperation.”19 This “enabling concept of justice” requires that the law must act as a guarantor that Mack, Desmond, and, yes, even Yertle have the ability “to develop and exercise their capacities and express their needs, thoughts, and feelings.”20 If Young is correct, a civil society that fails in this role is not just and must be made so.
King and the Law
[All persons] are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness—That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.21
Are we ever justified in defying unjust rule? To answer this, it would be helpful to explain just why we are obliged to obey society’s laws at all. Recall that the social contract is a complex set of rules and arrangements to which we agree to be bound in order to gain some set of benefits. Essentially, we gain the benefits of living in a community. We escape from the state of nature and receive a guarantee of certain rights enforced by society’s laws. To gain these benefits we agree to follow the laws of the society that makes these benefits possible. In this way we are obliged to follow rules ranging from the speed at which we can drive to not stealing from one another, from how much we pay in taxes to not dumping sewage into the water supply. In this way, under social contract theory there is a strong prima facie duty to play according to society’s rules.
Now, what if those rules are stacked so that one group of persons within the society is denied the rights enjoyed by all of the rest? Locke argued that by failing to provide for its citizens as required, the state has placed itself in a state of war with them and so must be replaced with a new social contract. Prominent leader of the American civil rights movement, Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–1968), took a slightly different approach—not arguing for a new contract