The Idea of Justice in Political Economy [6]
virtues and vices; it conventionally values this kind of action more highly than that, and so demands accordingly in one case greater rewards or greater honors, in another severer punishments or smaller incomes. These conventional standards of valuation are more or less the starting-point of every judgment of justice. A new and changed conception is measured in the first instance by its deviation from the traditions. As every fixation of price in society is not anew the result of demand and supply, but as demand and supply only try to modify traditional values, so it is also with the valuing judgments of justice or injustice. The sum of that which has been handed down as just, invariably forms the real basis of all judgments. A refined intuition of right demands a change here and there; in opposition to the sum total of conceptions of the just, this is only a single, but an important point. In existing customs and in existing law, these conventional and traditional standards of valuation have their real bulwark; thus they have assumed a form which firmly, rigidly and uniformly governs wide circles of mankind, and in that well-defined form they are handed down from generation to generation. But they also can be found outside of this solid ground; they originate everywhere from repetitions of similar cases and form the basis of judgments of what is just. These judgments, indeed, arise daily and hourly in the mind of every thoughtful man in regard to all social relations of life; they are not confined to actual law. In family life the sister thinks it unjust that the brother is favored; in every social circle, visits, invitations, even smiles, looks and compliments are resented as unjust preferences. The mental processes are the same whether here or on the ground of actual law. Everywhere it is in the main traditional standards which govern our judgment. These traditional and conventional standards are the historical precipitate of the conception of justice of hundreds of millions of men, on whose shoulders we stand. Through these traditions the seemingly irregular, the casual and individual takes firm body and lasting form in spite of constant transformations and renewals. From this standpoint we can easily refute the naive objection that there is no way to apply the conception of the just to economic matters, because, it is said, incomparable quantities and qualities are in question, the different kinds of work, the functions of the employer and the day-laborer being immeasurable by any common standard. They forget that the formation of prices in the market equalizes that which is seemingly incomparable, as, for instance, an edition of Goethe and a bottle of champagne; that in every penal code two things which appear to be still more heterogeneous, a fine of so and so much money and a day's imprisonment are in a fixed ratio according to a conventional standard. Everywhere in the questions of prices and of law the traditional and conventional judgment, that this is to be called equal and not that, is fundamental. Only should we have to begin every moment to form our judgments anew would this objection be reasonable. As things are, the fact remains that the average earnings of the employer; compared to the wages of the laborer, can be raised or lowered by a change in demand and supply within such an economic organization as exists to-day; that independently thereof, in consequence of traditional standards on the one hand and of the modern sentiments and ideals on the other, this change, as soon as it has reached a certain extent, will appear just or unjust. And whenever these and similar questions are discussed, when opinions differ about them, the controversy is not, as a rule, between those who wish to apply the categories of justice to these phenomena, and those who deny their applicability; but the struggle is between older and traditional standards of judgment and new ones, the ideals of the eighteenth century with those of the nineteenth; the struggle is between a cruder conception of right and a more refined