Modern political philosophers (such as Rawls, Dworkin, and others) have tried to reconcile the traditional liberal concern for liberty with the demands of distributive justice, the latter understood as a concern with the claims that the disadvantaged members of society may have on the rest. These writers realize that the coercion needed to realize distributive justice may impinge on personal liberty, and have therefore suggested principles of justice and/or concrete institutional arrangements that reflect a compromise between freedom and material equality or welfare. This compromise will hopefully make state coercion acceptable.
However, I have noticed recently a new approach to justice. This new view revives the ancient definition of justice as simply giving to everyone what they deserve. The word “giving” here is important. It refers, in this new conception, to material resources. Justice requires that each person receive a portion of society’s material wealth; everyone is entitled to a level of resources. The implication (sometimes stated, sometimes unstated) is that the state may use coercion to achieve this just distribution. This view owes much to G.A. Cohen, in particular his insistence that justice is a pure concept uncontaminated by facts or by the need to tolerate second-best solutions. The purity of justice means that, just as concessions to efficiency may lead to injustice, so concessions to liberty may lead to injustice. Liberty is outside justice, as it were, so an unjust outcome (one that fails to give each what each deserves) is still unjust when the failure to achieve it is due to our reluctance to allow too much intrusion into personal liberty. This new approach is exemplified in a recent article by Lucas Stancyk in a leading specialized journal. It argues that justice authorizes states to constrain occupations or to force people into jobs if doing so is necessary to achieve the human welfare that justice requires. The argument is disarmingly simple: if in deference to liberty we fail to prevent the emigration of doctors that are needed to provide the health care that justice requires, then we (society) commit or tolerate an injustice.
I don’t want to rehearse the obvious arguments that any liberal (let alone libertarian) worth his salt can give against such a view. I simply observe that this new approach to justice has drifted fatally from any conception that can be called liberal. For how could a liberal possibly justify such views? Perhaps he could say that prohibiting the emigration of doctors will increase total liberty in society, for example, by restoring the (positive) liberty of the doctor’s patients. This move ignores the obvious reply: that on any but the most crude utilitarian view the intrusion in the doctor’s freedom cannot be justified by an increase in total freedom. A government may not imprison a few political dissidents just to increase the total amount of free speech in society (say). But I don’t think this would be the argument. The argument, I suspect, is Cohen’s: justice is an independent value, it concerns only distributive shares in society, and is unaffected by considerations of liberty. If one’s goal is to realize just social outcomes, liberty will have to yield. In the end, for this view, personal projects don’t matter: individuals are resources that the state may use to achieve distributive goals. All I can say is that I hope persons with such views never reach positions of power.