A Dialectic of Justice: Critiquing Social Conventions and Motivating Practice

Socrates’ infamous question, “What is Justice?” in Plato’s Republic, spawned a debate for philosophers (and societies), and the answers continue to be important and contested today. The diversity of approaches and persistence of disagreement has inclined some contemporary philosophers to adopt a position of moral relativism. Relativism is the thesis that there are many equally valid frameworks for making value judgments and that these judgments are right or wrong only relative to the operative framework. One advocate of this position, Gilbert Harman, argues that our various moral frameworks are ‘completely conventional’, the result of a social contract whose terms arise from the self-interested bargaining of its participants (Harman 6). In contrast to this approach, John Rawls offers a direct and non-relative response to Socrates’ problematic question: the theory of ‘justice as fairness’. Rawls claims that, although particular conceptions of justice may vary from society to society, the concept, i.e., the criteria governing what counts as a conception of justice at all, is non-conventional. As such, it is not subject to the kind of bargaining described by Harman.