Conclusion: In modern society, law is not a judge of
morality but a negotiation of
conflicting personal interests.
1. The concept of justice and fairness is entirely relative to the
individual, not the community (i).
a. Law is the unanimous rule of “obedience”
an individual is expected to live by (244).
i. Rules are a “prior agreement” and not
necessarily something that molds to the desires of every individual (i).
b.
Our self-interested
culture prevents basic issues to be rationally judged (244).
c. “A community is composed of individuals,
each with his or her own interest, who then have to come together and formulate
common rules of life (250).”
2. What a person considers politically “fair” and “unfair” is based on
his social and economic position. (245).
a.
For example,
redistributive taxation is either unjust or just depending on a taxpayer’s
personal values (245).
i.
An individual may believe raising taxes is an injustice to his
hard-earned livelihood (244).
ii.
An individual may think not raising
taxes is an injustice to the condition of the poor and deprived (245).
iii.
“The price for one
person…receiving justice is always paid by someone else (246).”
b.
Thus, a community cannot
decide that “entitlement” is more or less moral than “need”—it is an individual
determination (i).
3. Justice
is neither moral nor immoral (i).
a. John Rawles: Justice is the equal
redistribution of “needs” to help the disadvantageous (249).
i. The rational form of justice as long as
a person has a “veil of ignorance” and is completely detached from the
knowledge of his own self-interest (i).
b. Robert Nozick: Justice is what you
earn and are “entitled” to (247).
i. When you directly acquire something
from its “original” source (247).
ii. When you acquire something by
trading or buying (247).
c. Premise 4a and 4b are false.
i. No one is ever under a veil of
ignorance (249).
ii. No one is a legitimate heir of
anything—everything has been stolen or taken by force at one point in history
before it was inherited by anyone (251).
d. “The metaphor of ‘weighing’ moral claims
is not just inappropriate, but misleading (246).”
e. Justice is an intermediary between the
extreme views of Rawles and Nozick (i).
4. Justice is a compromise within a community (i).
a.
Society can never reach
a moral consensus (252).
b. “[Laws] play the role of [a]
peacekeeping or truce-keeping body by negotiating its way through an impasse of
conflict (253).”
c. Therefore, laws are not lessons of
morality; they are compromises between what person A and person B finds
personally virtuous (i).
d. Regardless of what an individual thinks
is good, a law is only relevant if it is good for the entire community (i).
