Too little
Influence as entitlement
“Put the support where the constituent messages are.”
Electoral attention substitutes for the merits of a claim.
Justice
Give people affected by a policy serious consideration even when they cannot reward your attention.
Steady concern that people receive what is ethically due to them.
Justice gives legitimate claims serious consideration, including when their holders have little influence. Public decisions distribute benefits, burdens and opportunities among people whose ability to attract attention is unequal. A responsible account asks what each is due and why, rather than treating popularity, gratitude or electoral usefulness as the measure of a claim.
Justice gives serious consideration for claims without political weight
The school-board committee is deciding how to allocate transport support. Its summary counts messages from local voters; pupils still attending the schools while temporarily housed outside the district barely appear. The empty inbox column is offered as a reason to leave their journeys out. You ask for the affected pupils’ circumstances to enter the assessment alongside the other claims, then explain how the competing needs were weighed. The inbox has acquired an impressive opinion of its own jurisdiction. The pupils’ stake in reaching school does not depend on their parents delivering votes.
Finding the balance in Justice
A school-board member must consider affected pupils’ claims even when their families offer little electoral reward.
A fitting response
Claims considered seriously
“Include the affected pupils, establish their circumstances, and explain the allocation.”
The decision weighs relevant claims beyond those represented in the voter correspondence.
Pursued too far
An automatic reversal
“Give the whole allocation to the overlooked group.”
Correcting an omission becomes a new way to disregard other legitimate claims.
Serious consideration does not guarantee every request can be met. Justice requires a defensible account of the criteria and competing claims, including those with little political leverage.
What Justice makes possible
People with little leverage can enter the public account as claimants rather than as objects of someone else’s benevolence. Better inclusion may reveal consequences that would otherwise be missed. It can also clarify the hard work still required when several well-founded claims cannot all be met in full.
Justice in ordinary life
An inconvenient schedule
When arranging a shared meeting, check who cannot attend before treating the available voices as the whole group.
A shared resource
Consider a less visible user’s legitimate need instead of distributing access only among the people you know best.
Nearby virtues, different work
Fairness
Fairness concerns impartial assessment. Justice asks that ethically significant claims receive their due even when their holders have little power.
Compassion
Compassion responds to suffering. Justice can recognize a claim even when its holder is unsympathetic or cannot tell a moving story.
Justice and its counterfeits
The grateful beneficiary
Help that requires public gratitude can counterfeit Justice by making a rightful claim depend on pleasing the decision-maker. Explain the basis of the response without demanding admiration.
The imagined public
Announcing what absent people want is a counterfeit of Justice when their claims have not been heard. Make participation possible and keep uncertainty visible.
How to cultivate Justice
Identify who is affected but missing from the available account.
Separate the merits of a claim from the claimant’s influence or popularity.
Explain the basis of a decision, especially when it cannot satisfy every legitimate request.
Try it today
In one ordinary group arrangement, check whether a missing person’s relevant needs have been considered.
Questions worth returning to
- Whose claim would matter even if they could offer nothing in return?
- Are we weighing the affected people’s claims or counting the rewards for attending to them?
Quotations and further reading
Seven selections to return to through the week. Follow a source link to read the surrounding passage.
The main aim in the reconstruction of society must be to get all that every man has to give, to bring the submerged millions into light and activity.
Follett makes individual participation part of democratic reconstruction. The affected pupils and their families belong in the public account as people with claims and knowledge, even when they offer the committee little electoral reward.
In proportion as any, no matter who, are excluded from it, the interests of the excluded are left without the guaranty accorded to the rest, and they themselves have less scope and encouragement than they might otherwise have to that exertion of their energies for the good of themselves and of the community, to which the general prosperity is always proportioned.
John Stuart Mill · Considerations on Representative Government · Chapter III
Mill recognizes that exclusion from government leaves interests vulnerable, although his book elsewhere imposes exclusions of its own. The transport decision tests whether families outside the voting constituency still receive serious consideration.
But, if women are to be excluded, without having a voice, from a participation of the natural rights of mankind, prove first, to ward off the charge of injustice and inconsistency, that they want reason, else this flaw in your NEW CONSTITUTION, the first constitution founded on reason, will ever show that man must, in some shape, act like a tyrant, and tyranny, in whatever part of society it rears its brazen front, will ever undermine morality.
Mary Wollstonecraft · A Vindication of the Rights of Woman · Dedication to Talleyrand
Addressing Talleyrand, Wollstonecraft challenges women’s exclusion from rights and representation. The force of the passage is its demand that exclusion answer to a principle, rather than treating the people already present as the whole public.
What vehicle of correction is provided for the people themselves, what device has been invented for loosing that kindliness and mutual aid which is the marvel of all charity visitors?
Jane Addams · Newer Ideals of Peace · Chapter III
After discussing social investigation, Addams asks how people can act on their own conditions. The committee needs a usable way for affected families to correct its account of their journeys before it allocates support.
It is not what a lawyer tells me I MAY do, but what humanity, reason, and justice tell me I OUGHT to do.
Edmund Burke · Speech on Conciliation with America · House of Commons, 22 March 1775
Burke distinguishes a claim of authority from the judgment of how it should be exercised, while seeking to preserve the British Empire. His question presses the decision-maker to consider the ethical grounds of an action even when a narrower claim of power appears settled.
In teaching there should be no distinction of classes.
Confucius · The Analects · Book XV, chapter XXXVIII · Translated by James Legge
Legge renders this saying as a refusal of class distinctions in teaching. It puts a status barrier in question; the board’s separate modern task is to assess the pupils’ claims without treating electoral influence as their worth.
If the local majority attempts to oppress the minority, or one class another, the state is bound to interpose.
John Stuart Mill · Considerations on Representative Government · Chapter XV
In Mill’s account of local administration, local discretion is limited where it oppresses a minority. The strength of a voting majority does not itself answer the affected families’ claims.
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Practice this collection
Choose this approved collection as an optional workbook program, or select individual virtues in My Virtues.