Stoics believe in justice. Stoics are for justice. In fact, Stoics do not think there are goods other than virtue or ‘general justice’. But that doesn’t mean that Stoics can necessarily believe in ‘social justice’. I’d like to argue that they can, but it’s far from obvious when you consider that the typical social justice advocate and the ‘Stoic justice warrior’ begin thinking about justice from a different starting place. In this short article, I’d like to outline these starting places and show why Stoics must start our thinking about social justice from a different place than others do.
The Landscape
There are three basic ‘locations’ of justice in philosophy—three kinds of thing which can fundamentally be said to be just or unjust: people, rules, and situations. These correspond to three basic kinds of ethical theory generally: virtue theory, deontological ethics, and consequentialist ethics. Stoics are notably virtue theorists, however as we shall see, that entails that we cannot take social justice as a fundamental theoretical concept—we have to explain social justice in terms of personal justice. Let’s explore the alternatives first.
Consequentialist Social Justice
Consequentialists believe that situations themselves are just or unjust: a situation might be something like the gender pay gap. Consequentialists start their account of just or unjust people and rules in terms of their relationship to a just or unjust situation.
For example, if the gender pay gap is unjust, a consequentialist could say that people and social norms that contribute to the gender pay gap are also unjust.
Likewise, many people think that it is unjust that men and women are not equally represented in managerial positions. Note that this view is different from saying that it is unjust for women to be discriminated against by their employers. Unjust discrimination is an unjust action performed by an unjust individual. If however, we take the situation itself to be unjust we must maintain that the situation is unjust even when no discrimination has occurred. If that is the case, then we might think in fact positive discrimination or affirmative action would be necessary.
Deontological Social Justice
Alternatively, we could start with just or unjust social norms and laws—that is, unjust rules.
Statutory paternity leave is a rule. It equalises the legal opportunity for women and men to monetise spending some of their time with a newborn child. Arguably it’s a just rule regardless of the consequences. Suppose a country offers the option of paternity leave in lieu of maternity leave. Five to ten years down the line it appears that the policy has not had a substantial effect on the number of women in managerial positions. Is the policy a success? If the law was intended to change the distribution of management jobs across sexes, then the law was a failure. If the purpose of the law was to respect the fact that both sexes can make a meaningful contribution to postnatal care, then the law is a raving success.
Problems
These two starting points for social justice—consequences and rules—have motivated people to bring about meaningful and valuable social change. One huge advantage of both of these conceptions of justice is that they can very easily be applied to societies as a whole. A whole society lives in the circumstances and under the laws and norms that surround that society.
By contrast, Stoics focus on justice as a state of an individual. It is reasonable for critics to ask us therefore how we can apply justice as a concept to society as a whole. One might be tempted to treat Stoicism as an account of personal justice and then borrow another starting point for social justice. However consequentialist justice and deontologist justice have their own severe limitations. Understanding those limitations can help us understand why it is so important to have a virtue-theoretic account of social justice.
Justice out of Control: The Problem with Consequentialism
There are numerous ‘just outcomes’ that philosophers have thought society should aspire to. Three notable examples are equality, maximality and sufficiency. On an egalitarian view of justice, society is just if outcomes are equal for everyone. On a maximalist view of justice, society is just so long as the aggregated outcomes for everyone are constantly getting better without end. On a sufficientarian view of justice, a just society is one in which no one’s situation drops below a threshold of utility.
One problem for all these views is that many so-called injustices are completely outside of human control and certainly outside of the control of live human individuals. For instance, some humans live in areas affected by hurricanes and others don’t. Different people have differing levels of intelligence. So even if you distribute artefacts like money in an equal or otherwise ideal distribution across the population, human life will still have an element of chance and the arbitrary distribution of opportunities afforded by nature itself will feel profoundly irrational and unjust. It’s easy for people on either side of a particular turn of fate to resent each other if they think of justice as a situation. Epictetus warns us against harbouring such a sentiment in his handbook:
Remember then, that if you think the things which are by nature slavish to be free, and the things which are in the power of others to be your own, you will be hindered, you will lament, you will be disturbed, you will blame both gods and men.
—Enchiridion, 1.2
There is an old story that illustrates Epictetus’s point well. Cain grows fruit. Abel raises animals. Both offer sacrifices to their God. As it turns out God likes meat—who knew?! It’s an arbitrary choice and it disadvantages Cain. It’s not Cain’s fault that God doesn’t like his sacrifice—nor is it Abel’s. For that matter, it’s not even God’s fault that Cain grows fruit. It’s just a situation that they are all in—and an opportunity for them all to work together. But in the story, Cain blames Abel for his woes and kills him.
We see a similar dynamic play out today where the haves and have-nots blame each other personally for macroeconomic situations which are largely inherited from previous generations and ultimately from the brutality of nature. Class guilt, class prejudice and resentment festers on all sides of a web of intersectional divides which only serve to alienate us from people with whom we share a common rational nature.
Of course, we all have control over everything that we choose to do and not do, and these choices can have a positive and negative effect on the lives of other people. However, if it is not our individual choices that we own and identify with, and we begin identifying ourselves with the historical accident of our birth—whether that be to a disadvantaged or advantaged race, sex, or class—we attach moral significance to what is meaningless and out of anyone’s control. We ought rather to make life more preferable to all of us, but by calling our social situation ‘unjust’ we implicitly ascribe blame to people for what is outside their control and thereby create enemies out of people who could be our friends. It’s counterproductive and there is a real danger that we sacrifice personal virtue ‘for the social good.’
No 12 Rules for Justice: The Problem with Starting with Deontology
The rules we choose to employ are far more in our control than the situations. Chrysippus opens his lost work ‘On Laws’ by stating that
law is king of all things human and divine. Law must preside over what is honourable and base, as ruler and as guide, and thus be the standard of right and wrong, prescribing to animals whose nature is political what they should do, and prohibiting them from what they should not do.
—On Laws, fragment preserved by Marcian (Long and Sedley 67R)
If we take that statement at face value, human legislators have the task of setting out a finite list of rules which details to each individual what he should or shouldn’t do. However, this is clearly impossible. The right thing to do will vary from circumstance to circumstance, which is why humans move from rule-following to reason directed action as they mature. This means that it is literally impossible to legislate the just action in every circumstance.
Real human laws don’t even try. For instance, in common law, there is typically a criminal defence for ‘reasonable force.’ It’s against the law to punch someone in the face and normally this is a just law. But what if the guy is stealing your 5-year-old daughter from her bed? One expects that if you were charged with assault in this situation, the law would defer to the judgement of rational individuals—often a jury—to determine if punching the kidnapper was a reasonable use of force. This is a tacit admission on the part of the law that it cannot handle exceptions as well as humans can. The law requires just human action both on the part of a judiciary, lawyers, and often a jury. Often judges will also rely upon case law in their own judgements—they want the law to be predictable—but they will also deviate from and overthrow precedents that are reasoned to be unjust.
For this reason, Cicero’s Laelius (Republic 3.33 ) says “true law is right reason, in agreement with nature, diffused over everyone, consistent, everlasting, whose nature is to advocate duty by prescription and to deter wrongdoing by prohibition. ” In other words, Cicero understood the Stoics to simply eliminate the concept of human-created law in favor of natural moral law. For this reason Plutarch also records that the main thesis of Zeno’s republic is that “our household arrangements should not be based on cities or parishes, each one marked out by its own legal system,” Zeno’s view is that virtue is enough to govern human relations entirely—if of course it is exercised. “Zeno wrote this, picturing as it were a ‘dream’” (Plutarch, On the fortune of Alexander). In his City of God, Augustine—a Christian philosopher strongly influenced by Stoicism—points out that it is no accident that Cain from the story above goes on to found the first city to protect himself from the threat of retribution. The Biblical story mirrors the fratricidal founding of Rome. For Augustine, these ancient stories remind us that human political institutions are the outcomes of injustice—perhaps a necessary but suboptimal cure to it. Seneca endorses a similar thought as follows:
In that age which is called golden, Posidonius maintains that rule was in the hands of the wise. They restrained aggression, protected the weaker from the stronger, advised and dissuaded, and indicated what was advantageous and what was not. Their prudence saw to it that their people lacked for nothing, their courage averted dangers, and their generosity enabled their subjects to progress and flourish… But with the subsequent infiltration of vices and the alteration of kingdoms into tyrannies, the need for laws arose, which were themselves, to begin with, introduced by the wise.
—Letters to Lucilius, 90.5–6.
Whether or not there ever was a ‘golden age,’ the point of Zeno’s ‘dream’ and of Posidonius’s ‘golden age’ is to show that if people are reasonable we wouldn’t need laws. However, even just laws require the judiciousness of reasonable people. This asymmetrical dependency shows that actually, moral justice is fundamental to legal/political justice.
Reasoning as a Foundation for Social Justice
None of what I have written proves that there are not laws and situations which are more preferable to the just. What is being shown is that justice is fundamentally virtue and only secondarily applies to laws and social circumstances. If we are going to develop a Stoic concept of social justice we must start with virtue.
I believe that it is very likely that we can indeed have an account of social justice based on virtue. It is outside the scope of this particular piece to spell out what that account might be however, I think we can say something significant about virtue as a foundation for human action.
Stoics believe that virtue is action in accordance with reason or Logos (λόγος). However I would argue that human reasoning is an essentially collective action. By collective action I mean an action that is normally performed by more than one person. It takes two to tango. It takes two to fight. And it takes (at least) two to reason. Reasoning is a language-driven activity and no human is capable of a private language. We inherit a vocabulary and linguistic forms of thought from other humans.
Of course humans talk to themselves and reason with themselves, but this isn’t the normal use of reason. Similarly people could tango by themselves but this isn’t the normal way to tango. When we act according to reason, we are essentially acting in ways that make our actions intelligible to others. If this is true, and if virtue is an action in accordance with reason, then it is most virtuous for us to reason with others and having gained some level of rational consensus, act reasonably and collectively with others.
While justice will be possible in isolation, it will normally take the form of collective action from a consensus of reason. This kind of just collective activity could be the foundation of a just society.
