justice and equality essay

5 Essays to Learn More About Equality

“Equality” is one of those words that seems simple, but is more complicated upon closer inspection. At its core, equality can be defined as “the state of being equal.” When societies value equality, their goals include racial, economic, and gender equality . Do we really know what equality looks like in practice? Does it mean equal opportunities, equal outcomes, or both? To learn more about this concept, here are five essays focusing on equality:

“The Equality Effect” (2017) – Danny Dorling

In this essay, professor Danny Dorling lays out why equality is so beneficial to the world. What is equality? It’s living in a society where everyone gets the same freedoms, dignity, and rights. When equality is realized, a flood of benefits follows. Dorling describes the effect of equality as “magical.” Benefits include happier and healthier citizens, less crime, more productivity, and so on. Dorling believes the benefits of “economically equitable” living are so clear, change around the world is inevitable. Despite the obvious conclusion that equality creates a better world, progress has been slow. We’ve become numb to inequality. Raising awareness of equality’s benefits is essential.

Danny Dorling is the Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography at the University of Oxford. He has co-authored and authored a handful of books, including Slowdown: The End of the Great Acceleration—and Why It’s Good for the Planet, the Economy, and Our Lives . “The Equality Effect” is excerpted from this book. Dorling’s work focuses on issues like health, education, wealth, poverty, and employment.

“The Equality Conundrum” (2020) – Joshua Rothman

Originally published as “Same Difference” in the New Yorker’s print edition, this essay opens with a story. A couple plans on dividing their money equally among their children. However, they realize that to ensure equal success for their children, they might need to start with unequal amounts. This essay digs into the complexity of “equality.” While inequality is a major concern for people, most struggle to truly define it. Citing lectures, studies, philosophy, religion, and more, Rothman sheds light on the fact that equality is not a simple – or easy – concept.

Joshua Rothman has worked as a writer and editor of The New Yorker since 2012. He is the ideas editor of newyorker.com.

“Why Understanding Equity vs Equality in Schools Can Help You Create an Inclusive Classroom” (2019) – Waterford.org

Equality in education is critical to society. Students that receive excellent education are more likely to succeed than students who don’t. This essay focuses on the importance of equity, which means giving support to students dealing with issues like poverty, discrimination and economic injustice. What is the difference between equality and equity? What are some strategies that can address barriers? This essay is a great introduction to the equity issues teachers face and why equity is so important.

Waterford.org is a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving equity and education in the United States. It believes that the educational experiences children receive are crucial for their future. Waterford.org was founded by Dr. Dustin Heuston.

“What does equality mean to me?” (2020) – Gabriela Vivacqua and Saddal Diab

While it seems simple, the concept of equality is complex. In this piece posted by WFP_Africa on the WFP’s Insight page, the authors ask women from South Sudan what equality means to them. Half of South Sudan’s population consists of women and girls. Unequal access to essentials like healthcare, education, and work opportunities hold them back. Complete with photographs, this short text gives readers a glimpse into interpretations of equality and what organizations like the World Food Programme are doing to tackle gender inequality.

As part of the UN, the World Food Programme is the world’s largest humanitarian organization focusing on hunger and food security . It provides food assistance to over 80 countries each year.

“Here’s How Gender Equality is Measured” (2020) – Catherine Caruso

Gender inequality is one of the most discussed areas of inequality. Sobering stats reveal that while progress has been made, the world is still far from realizing true gender equality. How is gender equality measured? This essay refers to the Global Gender Gap report ’s factors. This report is released each year by the World Economic Forum. The four factors are political empowerment, health and survival, economic participation and opportunity, and education. The author provides a brief explanation of each factor.

Catherine Caruso is the Editorial Intern at Global Citizen, a movement committed to ending extreme poverty by 2030. Previously, Caruso worked as a writer for Inquisitr. Her English degree is from Syracuse University. She writes stories on health, the environment, and citizenship.

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About the author, emmaline soken-huberty.

Emmaline Soken-Huberty is a freelance writer based in Portland, Oregon. She started to become interested in human rights while attending college, eventually getting a concentration in human rights and humanitarianism. LGBTQ+ rights, women’s rights, and climate change are of special concern to her. In her spare time, she can be found reading or enjoying Oregon’s natural beauty with her husband and dog.

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Justice as a Virtue

The notion of justice as a virtue began in reference to a trait of individuals, and to some extent remains so, even if today we often conceive the justice of individuals as having some (grounding) reference to social justice. But from the start, the focus on justice as a virtue faced pressures to diffuse, in two different ways.

First, “justice as a virtue” is ambiguous as between individual and social applications. Rawls and others regard justice as “the first virtue of social institutions” (1971, p. 3), but Rawls is not the first to think of justice as a virtue of social institutions or societies — Plato was there long before him. However, justice as a virtue of societies, polities, and their institutions is addressed elsewhere , so the focus in this essay will be on justice as a virtue in individuals. That said, individuals typically live as members of political communities, so the societal dimension of justice as a virtue will never be long out of view (Woodruff 2018).

Second, from the start the effort to analyze the virtue of justice has led to attempts to formalize the requirements (or norms) of justice, and at times the latter project has threatened to swallow the first in ways that make thinking of a virtue of justice gratuitous or otiose. We might be tempted to think that the virtue of justice consists simply in compliance with the norms of justice our theory specifies: a just person will be one who complies with the norms of justice, whether those are narrowly interpersonal or more broadly social or political in scope. In this way the virtue becomes subsidiary to norms of justice independently specified (Anderson 2010, p. 2; LeBar 2014). Doing so threatens to lose the force that the notion of virtue had in the earliest thinking about justice.

A further complication is that even the idea of justice as a virtue of individuals seems ambiguous in regard to scope. Plato in the Republic treats justice as an overarching virtue of both individuals and societies, so that almost every issue he (or we) would regard as ethical comes in under the notion of justice. But in later usages justice covers only part of individual morality, and we don’t readily think of someone as unjust if they lie or neglect their children — other epithets more readily spring to mind. Individual justice first and most readily regards moral issues having to do with distributions of goods or property. It is, we say, unjust for someone to steal from people or not to give them what he owes them, and it is also unjust if someone called upon to distribute something good (or bad or both) among members of a group uses an arbitrary or unjustified basis for making the distribution. Discussion of justice as an individual virtue often centers on questions, therefore, about property and other distributable goods, though the broader sense broached by Plato never entirely disappears. Still there is disagreement over whether the broader distributive questions associated with political morality have subordinated or obscured the earlier Greek concerns with justice as a virtue of individual character (Hursthouse 1999, pp. 5–6; Coope 2007; Lu 2017).

1.1 Ancient

1.2 medieval and modern, 2. social psychology and justice, 3. justice as a virtue of societies.

• 4. Justice and other Virtues

5. Recent Developments

6. conclusion, other internet resources, related entries.

Philosophical discussion of justice begins with Plato, who treats the topic in a variety of dialogues, most substantially in Republic . There Plato offers the first sustained discussion of the nature of justice ( dikaiosune ) and its relation to happiness, as a departure from three alternatives receiving varying degrees of attention. First, there is a traditionalist conception of justice (speaking the truth and paying your debts). Second, Plato has Socrates rebut the Sophist conception of justice which built on a distinction between nature ( phusis ) and convention ( nomos ) As Plato has this conception articulated by Thrasymachus in Book I, justice is simply the “advantage of the stronger,” not tracking anything like the sort of value attributed to it by traditionalists. Finally, Plato has Socrates confront a conventionalist conception of justice that anticipates modern contractarian views, in which justice — forbearing preying on others in exchange for not being preyed on by them — is a “second-best alternative,” not as good as being able to prey at will upon others, but better than being the prey of others. These last two challenges give rise to the central question of the book: to whose advantage is justice? Would we really be better off being unjust if we could get away with it? Plato’s negative answer to that question is the project of the balance of the work.

Plato’s method involves the provocative idea that justice in the city ( polis ) is the same thing as justice in the individual, just “writ large.” There are good reasons to worry about that assumption (Williams 1973; Keyt 2006). But in Plato’s sociology of the city, there are three classes engaged in a kind of division of labor. There is a guardian class which rules, a class of “auxiliaries” that provide the force behind the ruling, and the class of merchants that produce to satisfy the needs and desires of the city. Similarly, the psyche of the individual has three parts: a reasoning part to rule, a “spirited” part to support the rule of reason, and an appetitive part. Plato finds justice in the city to consist in each part “having and doing its own,” and since the smaller is just like the larger, justice in the individual consists in each part of the psyche doing its own work. (This grounds the idea, later enshrined by Justinian, that justice is “giving every man his due;” Justinian I.i). Further, Plato argues, justice is a master virtue in a sense, because in both the city and the psyche, if each part is doing its own job, both city and psyche will also have wisdom, courage, and moderation or self-discipline. This conception of justice sustains the contrast with the conventionalist view advocated by the Sophists. On the other hand, at least initially it leaves it an open question whether the just individual refrains from such socially proscribed actions as lying, killing, and stealing. Plato eventually seeks to show that someone with a healthy, harmonious soul wouldn’t lie, kill, or steal, but it is not clear that argument succeeds, nor, if it does, that that is the right understanding of why we ought not to lie, kill, or steal (Sachs 1963; LeBar 2013, ch. XII).

Plato gives a somewhat different treatment of justice in Crito , in which Socrates’ eponymous friend attempts to persuade Socrates to accept his (Crito’s) offer to bribe a way out of the death sentence Socrates is waiting to have executed. Here Plato’s arguments first associate the just life with the good life, thus the life Socrates has most reason to live. And justice, he then argues, requires not only not inflicting wrong or injury on others, even in response to wrongs from them, but fulfilling one’s agreements, and — in particular — abiding by one’s (tacit or explicit) agreement to abide by the laws of the city unless one can persuade it to change them. Of course, justice cannot require one to abide by laws that require one to act unjustly, as Socrates’ own case (as characterized in Apology ) shows (Kraut 1984).

It is worth noting (as Johnston 2011 observes) that even if Plato’s is the first philosophical discussion of justice, a concern with what an individual is due as a matter of justice is a driving issue in Homer’s Iliad , though there is no counterpart concern there with justice as a property of a society or tribe. So even Plato’s philosophical concerns are building on well-established questions about what justice requires of us in our treatment of one another.

Aristotle does not see the virtue of justice in quite the comprehensive sense Plato does; he treats it as a virtue of character (in the entirety of one of the ten books of the Nicomachean Ethics , also common to the Eudemian Ethics ), and as a virtue of constitutions and political arrangements (in Politics ). The question naturally arises as to the relation between these forms of justice. Aristotle seems to think they are closely related, without being synonymous applications of the same concept. As the latter is a conception of political justice, we will focus here on the former. Justice as a personal virtue follows Aristotle’s model for virtues of character, in which the virtue lies as an intermediate or mean between vices of excess and defect ( Nicomachean Ethics V). While he grants that there is a “general” sense of justice in which justice is coincident with complete virtue, there is a “particular” sense in which it is concerned with not overreaching ( pleonexia ). It is not clear, however, exactly how Aristotle understands this arrangement, or the nature of the vices of excess and defect which this “particular” justice is to counteract. One very plausible reading has it that justice is opposed to a desire for maldistribution of “goods of fortune” such as money, fame, or honor (Williams 1980; Curzer 1995). On another it is opposed to an insufficient attention to others’ rights (Foot 1988, p. 9). On still another it focuses on the goods of others, or common goods (O’Connor 1988; Miller 1995).

These issues remain open in part because Aristotle seems most interested in establishing a conception of the formal structure of “particular” justice, which seems to reflect a conception of desert. He distinguishes between justice in distribution and justice in rectification. The former, he claims, adheres to a kind of proportionality, in which what each deserves is proportional to the relationship between the contributions. If A contributes twice as much as B (of whatever the metric of merit is relevant in some particular case), then A’s return ought also to be twice B’s. This conception of distributive justice obviously lends itself to “goods of fortune” — and to some goods, like wealth, more obviously than others — but it need not in principle be confined to such goods, although the examples Aristotle provides suggest such applications. Similarly, justice in rectification involves a sort of “arithmetical proportion.” If C defrauds D by amount X, then justice requires depriving C of X and restoring X to D, as a matter of reestablishing a kind of equality between them. These structural devices are elegant and attractive, but they leave open a number of questions (LeBar, forthcoming). First, as indicated, to what are we to suppose they apply? Second, in what way do they figure into the nature of the person who is just in the particular sense? (That is, how are they related to justice as a virtue?) Does a model of particular justice as a virtue fit the general model of virtue as a mean, and if so, what sort of mean is it? Aristotle seems torn between a conception of justice as a virtue in his distinctive understanding of what a virtue is — with a requirement that one have all the virtues to have any ( Nicomachean Ethics VI.13), and rooted in the doctrine of the mean — and justice as having the form of a formal normative structure, to which the virtue threatens to become subsidiary. All this is to leave aside questions of the relation between this “particular” sense of justice and political justice, and the role of the virtue of justice in the individual as it contributes to justice in the polis.

Epicurus’ conception of the role of justice was more central to his eudaimonism perhaps than its counterpart in Plato and Aristotle, but that reflects in part his distinctive understanding of eudaimonia , or happiness. For Epicurus this consisted in ataraxia — tranquility, or freedom from disturbance. Given that the good life is the life without disturbance, justice plays a key instrumental role. One might, Epicurus thinks, withdraw entirely from human society to avoid disturbance, but the alternative is to live socially under terms which secure the avoidance of disturbance. This is the structure of the ideal Epicurean community, in which each forbears aggression (Armstrong 1997, Thrasher 2013). Justice is a matter of keeping agreements generally, and in particular the agreement not to harm or transgress social norms.

In this way Epicurus offers a conception of the virtue of justice that harmonizes both its personal and its political dimensions. The personal virtue consists in the motivation to abide by a contract not to aggress or harm others. The political virtue inheres in a polity in which such norms regulate the conduct of its citizens, and these two dimensions of justice as a virtue reinforce each other.

The other great ethical tradition of antiquity (Stoicism) had remarkably little to say about justice (Annas 1993, p. 311), so we pass on to the medieval and modern periods.

The legacy of the ancients — Aristotle in particular — continued into the medieval period, notably in the work of Thomas Aquinas, who appropriated much of Aristotle’s philosophy while setting it into a Christian theological framework. As in Aristotle, virtue and virtues are prominent parts of his ethical theory. And, like Aristotle justice is an important virtue, though for Aquinas it less important than the virtue of charity, a Christian virtue that did not appear among the virtues recognized by Aristotle. There are other elements of his account that situate it in an interesting way in the transition from ancient eudaimonist accounts of virtue, to virtue as it appears in the modern era, before it recedes from prominence in ethical theory.

But to the extent Christian writers allied themselves with Plato and Aristotle, they were downplaying another central element in Christian thought and morality, the emphasis on agapic love. Such love seems to be a matter of motivationally active feeling rather than of being rational, and some writers on morality (eventually) allowed this side of Christianity to have a major influence on what they had to say about virtue.

Significant elements of the Aristotelian account of justice reappear in Aquinas’. First, justice is first and foremost a virtue of character rather than institutions, although Aquinas draws a distinction among such virtues not found in Aristotle. For Aquinas, justice as a virtue is a matter of perfection of the will, rather than the passions (ST II-II 58.4). Aquinas offers no account of justice as a virtue of societies or institutions, though he interprets the “general” sense of justice he borrows from Aristotle as being a matter of individual willing and action for the common good. “Particular” justice, which as in Aristotle’s account is most of his focus, has to do with relationships -- in particular but not limited to exchange -- between individuals as individuals (ST II-II 58.8).

Second, Aquinas grounds the norms for these exchanges in the ancient formula of Justinian, which hearkens back to Plato: justice is giving each his own. But his interpretation of this formula situates him astride a deep but subtle divide between ancient and modern thought. To some extent this effect is an upshot of his inheriting not only the Greek eudaimonist tradition, but also a Roman jurisprudential tradition in which notions like standing and right as claim (rather than, say, fairness) had begun to emerge (Porter 2016, p. 143). As a result, Aquinas’ synergistic account has some novel complications.

One major complication, relative to the ancient accounts, is that what is ours by right is a recognition of a kind of status, as an effect of the order among people ordained by God ( ST I-II 100.8). As Jean Porter points out, this establishes a normative standard for justice that does not grow out of the agent’s own perfection or eudaimonia (Porter 2016, p. 157). There are two significant follow-on implications.

First, the fabric of the eudaimonist approach to practical reasoning and life — inherited from the Greeks — begins to fray. For better or worse, on the Greek eudaimonist views (including here Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, and Epicurus) our reasons for action arise from our interest in a happy life. If the reason-giving nature of others arises from a different source, as this reading of Aquinas suggests, then practical reason seems to have a duality of ultimate sources, with the complications that kind of duality brings.

Second, this is the first step in the diminution of the theoretical significance of the virtues — a process that will not begin to be reversed until the middle of the 20th century. On Aristotle’s view, for example, the virtuous person sees reasons for acting that the non-virtuous do not (and that arguably are not there to be seen absent the effects of virtue — LeBar 2013; Berryman 2019). Virtue is no longer the normative epicenter of the theory, as it was for the Greeks. To the extent that this aspect of Aquinas’s view has virtue responsive to value or reasons that is accounted for in some way other than the work of virtue, it is the leading edge of process that will result in a much-reduced role for virtue in later ethical accounts

Hume is an excellent exemplar of this point, in both the Treatise and the Enquiries . Virtue, Hume maintains, is a matter of “some quality or character,” produced in one by “durable principles of the mind” ( T III.iii.I, p. 575). We deem such qualities virtues not, as on the ancient Greek view, because they conduce to the happiness of the person who has them, but because they have a “tendency to the good of mankind” or society. ( T III.iii.I). This service renders them pleasing to our “moral tastes:” our approbation, Hume tells us, has its source in “view of a character, which is naturally fitted to be useful to others, or to the person himself, or which is agreeable to others, or to the person himself” ( T III.iii.I, 591). We can think of that as the criterion some quality of character must have to be deemed a virtue. In consequence, what counts as virtuous is an upshot of, and not the source of, the normative foundations of this view.

By Hume’s time the content of justice as a virtue has shifted as well. In Hume’s treatment, the focus of justice is property — relations of “mine and thine.” It is a “cautious, jealous” virtue in the sense that it is focused on the sorts of exclusionary powers that are characteristic of property rules and relations. We may always be aspiring for more but justice aims at the preservation and security of what one has already ( E III.1, p. 184). So the virtue of justice, as Hume thinks of it, will in the main consist of a quality in one which disposes one to observe and uphold these rules.

What Hume wants to show is, first, that we can have such a disposition or quality (that is, that it is possible for us to have a quality or character to observe the rules of justice), and, second, that such a quality would count as a virtue, given his criteria. His approach to these questions in the Treatise is framed by a problem he has set up himself. To appreciate that problem, we have to step back to Hume’s broader view about moral motivation. Hume had argued that moral principles “are not conclusions of our reason” ( T III.i.I); instead, they are “more properly felt than judg’d of” ( T III.i.II). Morality, and virtue, is a matter of sentiments or passions. Why? Hume marshals a number of arguments to this effect which are not relevant to our purposes. The basic reason is that the functional roles of reason and the passions are markedly different, in Hume’s view. The task of reason is to discover truth or falsehood, in “relations of ideas” or “matters of facts” ( T III.i.I); as such, it utterly lacks the capacity to move us to action. Only the passions can do that ( T II.iii.III). The passions, on the other hand, have no representational content whatsoever; they are “original existences” ( T II.iii.III; III.i.I). Virtue is paradigmatically a practical matter: it is a property of what we do, and to act we must be motivated. That means any successful account of virtue must find it in our passions, not in any aspect of our reason ( T III.i.I). So far so good.

However, when we come to justice, we look in vain for a passion that can supply motive power for us to act justly. If anything, our natural motives move us away from justice ( T III.ii.II). Self-love requires “correcting and restraining” ( T III.ii.I). And only a passion can do that. But which? Hume himself dismisses the possibilities of public or private beneficence or universal love. In the end he concludes that there is no natural passion to explain it. Instead, it is in a certain crucial sense artificial ( T III.ii.VI). Under certain conditions, given that we are sensible of the advantages of living in human society, our self-love or self-interest may be given an “alteration of its direction,” and induce us to respect the rules of justice. These Hume thinks of primarily as involving honesty and “particular” property rules ( T III.ii.II). That “alteration” needs explanation.

Two facts about the conditions in which we act — one about us, one about our environment — set this alteration in motion. First, Hume maintains, we are limited in our generosity or benevolence. And second, we live in conditions of scarcity ( T III.ii.II). We have to work to make a go of it, and we cannot count on others to do so for us. We need control of our world to meet our needs, but we are vulnerable to the selfishness and predation of others.

The solution, Hume argues, is that we naturally fall into a “convention” by which we observe that rules of property — the observance of which is key to the virtue of justice — is good for all of us. This convention is no formal agreement; Hume argues that it cannot be something like the product of promise or compact ( T III.ii.II). Instead, “it arises gradually, and acquires force by a slow progression, and by our repeated experience of the inconveniences of transgressing it” ( T III.ii.II, p. 490). Much as two men pulling the oars in a boat together need no explicit agreement to find they prosper by such an arrangement, so do we generally. (Wilson 2018 explores support for Hume’s hypothesis through work in experimental economics.) So in the end it is self-interest that drives us to comply with the requirements of justice, though Hume adds that sympathy with the public interest induces our endorsement of it once justice has become established. This endorsement, however, is reserved for a scheme of property rules taken generally; as Hume observes, individual instances of compliance may frequently be “contrary to public interest,” though such compliance is still required of us. Hume believes the benefit of the system overall, both to society and to individual, requires that rules not admit of exceptions ( T III.ii.II, E Appendix III, §256). Self-interest accounts for the possibility of our being motivated to act as the virtue of justice requires, and both the utility and the agreeableness, both to ourselves and others, of a resulting social order with respected property rules, leads to our approbation of that motivation as a virtue.

In fact, this point — that “public utility is the sole origin of justice” — is the point of Hume’s discussion of justice in the Enquiries (III.I, ¶145). Scarcity imposes a need for us to distinguish mine from thine, and we have not sufficient generosity in our natures to do without property rules (as we might, say, in our families). And once again Hume argues that our recognition of the utility and necessity of justice provides “entire command over our sentiments” ( E III.II, ¶163).As David Johnston observes (Johnston 2011, p. 138), Hume’s understanding of the value of justice as instrumental in the promotion of utility marks a sharp shift from earlier understandings which invoked various forms of reciprocity in understanding that value.

Such a sentimentalist account of justice is also found in Adam Smith; in fact, a focus on the sentiments almost completely swamps concern for virtue. Our judgments of virtue and vice, he says, are compounded by consideration of two different “relations” in a sentiment: “the cause or object which excites or causes it, and … the end which it proposes” (TMS II.i.introduction). His focus on those two “relations” obviates any independent discussion of virtue per se. He does however explicitly countenance a virtue of justice, developed in contrast with the virtue of beneficence. In Smith, even more clearly than in Hume, one can see that this virtue consists in conformity to “rules” or “laws” of justice that appear to exist antecedently to the realization of the virtue itself, unlike ancient accounts. Smith indicates that justice merits resentment when absent, that it may be “extorted by force,” and that in the main it requires forbearing from harming others.. Smith calls justice a “negative virtue” in this respect: often all it requires is that we sit still and do nothing (Smith 1759, II.ii.I.5, 9). It is essential to the subsistence of society, Smith tells us (Smith 1759, II.ii.3.3-4), but — in contrast to Hume — is not reducible in its motivational basis to regard for society. Instead, our just concern for “multitudes” is compounded of our concern for individuals, which arises from “fellow-feeling,” which is yet short of “love, esteem, and affection” (Smith 1759, II.ii.3.7).

In Kant, finally, along with a movement away from sentimentalism we see the completion of the distinction between justice as a virtue and justice as a norm to which a virtue may or may not correspond. While Kant has a theory (or “doctrine”) of virtue, he distinguishes that theory precisely against a counterpoised theory of justice. The two are complementary elements in the “metaphysics of morals.” Moreover, the doctrine of justice itself has two parts, roughly corresponding to the distinction present since Plato’s work, between the role of justice in the individual and the role of justice in the state. Kant calls these “private right” and “public right,” respectively. But right in either case is not how Kant at least conceives of virtue; instead, right is a “condition” that can obtain between the moral agents comprising a moral or legal community, in virtue of their principles of choice in acting (Kant 1797). Little remains here of the notion of justice as a virtue of individuals as it began with the ancient Greeks.

20th-century developmental psychology drew deeply on the Kantian legacy. Piaget (1932/1948) treated moral development as principally involving increasing cognitive sophistication. More particularly, Piaget saw that sophistication as a matter of taking more and more general or universal views of moral issues, and endorsed the Kantian and rationalist idea that morality rests on and can be justified in terms of considerations of justice. Piaget saw a “law of evolution” in moral development, from an understanding of rules (including moral rules) as being “heteronomous” impositions of authority, to which one is objectively responsible, to a grounding in mutual respect, accompanied by subjective responsibility to others (Piaget 1932/1948, p. 225). This transition is fostered through social interaction, and attention to norms of equality and reciprocity replace those of mere obedience.

Educational psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg was inspired by Piaget to propose a conception of moral development that postulated six stages of human moral development. In his earliest work, Kohlberg identified the highest stage of such development with a concern for justice and human rights based on universal principles. Concern for relationships and for individual human well-being was embedded in a framework of conformity to social norms, at lower stages of the process. Moreover, he saw the ordering of the different stages in Piagetian fashion as basically reflecting differences in rational understanding: those whose moral thinking involved the invoking of universal principles of justice and rights were thought to show a more advanced cognitive development than those whose moral thought appeals primarily to the importance of relationships and of human well-being or suffering. The paradigm of moral development involves judgments that are “reversible,” in the sense that each party to the issue can accept the correct judgment by reversing his or her perspective and taking up the viewpoint of the other (Kohlberg 1981). The sophisticated moral reasoner will engage in a process of “moral musical chairs,” taking up the positions of the parties to the conflict successively. It is, on this version of Kohlberg’s thought, that formal feature of the deliberative process that is characteristic of greatest moral development. As his research and thought progressed, however, Kohlberg increasingly acknowledged that these formal features were less characteristic of overall moral development and thought than of the deployment of specifically justice-based concepts. In fact, Kohlberg was impressed by the work of Rawls, and thought that the nature of Rawls’ “original position of equality” exemplified the kind of reversibility that is paradigmatic of the highest form of moral thought (Kohlberg 1981, p. 204). However, his approach treats utilitarianism as less cognitively advanced (more primitive) than rationalist views like Kant’s, and utilitarians (like R.M. Hare) naturally called into question the objectivity and intellectual fairness of Kohlberg’s account.

More significantly, perhaps, the evidence for Kohlberg’s stage sequence was drawn from studies of boys, and when one applies the sequence to the study of young girls, it turns out that girls on average end up at a less advanced stage of moral development than boys do. In her 1982 book In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development , Carol Gilligan responded to Kohlberg’s views by questioning whether a theory of moral development based solely on a sample of males could reasonably be used to draw conclusions about the inferior moral development of women. Gilligan argued that her own studies of women’s development indicated that the moral development of girls and women proceeds and ends in a different fashion from that of boys and men, but that that proves nothing about inferiority or superiority: it is merely a fact of difference. In particular, Gilligan claimed that women tend to think morally in terms of connection to others (relationships) and in terms of caring about (responsibility for) those with whom they are connected; men, by contrast and in line with Kohlberg’s studies, tend to think more in terms of general principles of justice and of individual rights against (or individual autonomy from) other people. But Jean Hampton, among others, responded that Gilligan’s critique was itself a distortion, and that concerns for justice and individual rights are as significant for and in the moral lives of women as for men (Hampton 1993).

In recent years, a variety of social sciences have intensified investigation into aspects of our natures that are plausibly important for a virtue of justice. For example, Widlok 2018 surveys cross-cultural anthropological work examining the development of “ethical skill” in rightful and just sharing practices.

For a variety of reasons, many ethical thinkers have thought that justice cannot be based in sentiment but requires a more intellectually constructive rational(ist) basis, and in recent times this view of the matter seems to have been held, most influentially, by John Rawls in A Theory of Justice . Rawls makes clear his belief in the inadequacy of benevolence or sympathetic human sentiment in formulating an adequate conception of social justice. He says in particular that sentiment leaves unanswered or indeterminate various important issues of justice that a good theory of justice ought to be able to resolve.

Rawls’s positive view of justice is concerned primarily with the justice of institutions or (what he calls) the “basic structure” of society: justice as an individual virtue is derivative from justice as a social virtue defined via certain principles of justice. The principles, famously, are derived from an “original position” in which (very roughly) rational contractors under a “veil of ignorance” decide how they wish to commit themselves to being governed in their actual lives. Rawls deliberately invokes Kantian rationalism (or anti-sentimentalism) in explaining the intellectual or theoretical motivation behind his construction, and the two principles of justice that he argues would be agreed upon under the contractual conditions he specifies represent a kind of egalitarian political liberalism. Roughly, those principles stress (equality of) basic liberties and opportunities for self-advancement over considerations of social welfare, and the distribution of opportunities and goods in society is then supposed to work to the advantage of all (especially the worst-off members of society). He also says that the idea of what people distributively deserve or merit is derivative from social justice rather than (as with Aristotle and/or much common-sense thinking) providing the basis for thinking about social justice.

According to Rawls, individual justice is theoretically derivative from social justice because the just individual is to be understood as someone with an effective or “regulative” desire to comply with the principles of justice. However, it is not merely social justice that Rawls understands in (predominantly) rationalist fashion. When he explains how individuals (within a just society) develop a sense and/or the virtue of justice, he invokes the work of Piaget. Rawls lays more stress than Piaget does on the role our affective nature (sympathy and the desire for self-mastery) plays in the acquisition of moral virtue. But, like Piaget, he stresses the need for a sufficiently general appreciation and rational understanding of social relations as the grounding basis of a sense of duty or of justice and he explicitly classifies his account of moral development as falling within the “rationalist tradition.”

4. Justice and Other Virtues

Few would doubt that justice is a virtue of character. But there are other moral virtues. How is justice related to them? Is it more important? Even in Republic , in which Plato makes justice a “master virtue” of sorts, there are other virtues (wisdom, courage, and self-discipline), and elsewhere (notably Gorgias ) Plato makes self-discipline ( sophrosune ) the “master virtue,” so it is not clear that justice has any sort of priority over these other virtues. Likewise, though the texts we have show Aristotle devoting more space to justice, it is not clear that the particular form of the virtue of justice has any sort of pre-eminence. On the other hand, Cicero claims that justice is the “crowning glory” of the virtues ( De Officiis I.7). If we take virtue of character to have the moral centrality the ancients (perhaps in contrast to the moderns), how much importance should we accord to justice among the virtues?

Aquinas cites Cicero as a target in developing a sophisticated view of the relationships among the virtues ( ST II-II 58.12). On Aquinas’ view, Cicero is half right, for Aquinas distinguishes between virtues as responsive to appetites of our animal nature (moral virtues) and as responsive to appetites of our intellect (virtues of the will). He takes it that justice is preeminent over the moral virtues because it inheres in the rational part of the soul, and because its object is more noble (the good of others, or the common good, rather than the individual good). On that point he can agree with Cicero. However, these virtues themselves are not as excellent as the theological virtues, of which the greatest is love (or charity -- caritas; ST II-II 23.6). There are several arguments for this claim but it is grounded in Paul’s admonition to the Corinthians, that love is the greatest among the virtues of faith and hope (1 Corinthians 13:13).

In recent decades there have been secular challenges to the primacy of justice among virtues. Recall that Carol Gilligan had argued for a “different voice” for women in coming to grips with moral problems. Instead of a rights-based understanding of morality that gave special consideration to the individual, women saw relationships between people as primary (Gilligan 1983, pp. 19, 29). Kohlberg had offered a thought experiment about a man (“Heinz”) tempted to steal a life-saving drug to save his sick wife (Kohlberg 1981, p. 12). Whereas boys are more likely to think of Heinz’ dilemma in terms of what is the right thing to do, girls, Gilligan argues, see the world as “a world of relationships and psychological truths where an awareness of the connection between people gives rise to a recognition of responsibility for one another” (Gillian 1983, p. 30). Gilligan carefully frames this contrast as one between voices, not a matter of ranking of dispositions or virtues, but her work can and did provide a basis for making that sort of assessment between virtues, one on which (as in Aquinas’ case) love and care for others turns out to be more important than considerations of justice.

In some ways, Nel Nodding’s pioneering work in laying out an “ethic of care” takes such a step. Following Gilligan, she sees much ethical theory as missing a feminine voice, one which grounds moral concern for the concrete other in caring for them and their needs, and thus as relational rather than individualistic (Noddings 1983, 1999). Yet some caution is required before seeing her as taking up something like a Thomistic stance on the priority of love over justice. For one thing, to a significant degree she wants to emphasize the importance of the concrete and particular as opposed to the abstract and general (or the reliance on universal principles) in thinking and acting morally. But that is an emphasis which animates some particularistic forms of virtue ethics, and does not distinguish justice from love or other virtues. Moreover, where she explicitly argues that care “‘picks up’ where justice leaves off” (Noddings 1999, p. 12), she is thinking of justice as a property of institutions (e.g. Rawls’ theory of justice as fairness), and institutional implementations of those theories, not a virtue of character. She is clearly concerned about the limits of “rights-talk,” but that at least historically has not been a prominent part in thinking about justice as a virtue of character. Thus she does not clearly take a side in this matter.

Like Noddings, Virginia Held frames much of the point of the ethics of care against a historical theoretical backdrop of attention to justice (Held 1995, 2004, 2006). To some extent, like Noddings, for Held the relevant notion of justice is not a virtue of character but a concern with fairness, equality, and individual rights, or perhaps more generally impartial universal principles (Held 2004, p. 144; 2006, p. 14). In fact, Held more clearly poses an ethics of care as an alternative to virtue ethics (Held 2004, 143; 2006, 14). This is for two reasons. First, virtue ethical theories focus on dispositions and traits of individuals, whereas an ethics of care focuses on relations between individuals. Second, an ethics of care sees people as partially constituted by their relations with others, as opposed to the individualism characteristic of virtue ethics. Held does not think an ethics of care can do without a concern for justice as a value, however (Held 1995, 129). More generally, she believes, caring provides a “wider network” within which concerns for justice and virtue (as well as utility) should be fitted (2004, 147; 2006, 72). Margaret McLaren (2001), on the other hand, responds on the basis of commonalities between care ethics and virtue ethics that care ethics actually is most attractive when situated as an ethics of virtue. Marilyn Friedman (1987) similarly seems accepting of the general framework of virtue ethics, and of crucial places for virtues of both caring and justice within such a framework, responsive to different degrees and in different ways to gender differences she believes actually do hold, though not falling along a caring/justice fault line.

Michael Slote also accepts care ethics as well-situated as a virtue ethical theory, but argues for the necessity of conceiving such a theory as “agent-based” -- holding that motivation or motives are “the ultimate bases for evaluation of action, institutions, laws, and societies” (Slote 1998, p. 173). As he has developed his view, empathic motivation has come to take an increasing role (Slote 2010, p. 124). As with Noddings and Held, for Slote the relevant questions about justice are about forms of social organization, the allocation of rights, and so on. If there is a vestige of the Platonic/Justinian model of justice as a virtue, it would appear to figure in only as a rationale for the shape of some social policies reflecting e.g. social (or perhaps global) distributive justice. But empathy is the focal normative concern throughout. The justice of a society constitutively depends on the motives of the individuals who make it up (Slote 1998, p. 187; 2010, p. 128). If the relevant motives are caring or empathic ones, then Slote’s analysis would seem to collapse the distinction between caring and justice as virtues of individual character (or motivation). That is, individuals would count as just exactly to the degree that their motivations are empathic, and they thus contribute to the laws, policies, institutions, and so on in ways that are reflective of similar motivations across society. But that is just to say that they are caring motivations as well.

A somewhat different feminist critique of a focus on a virtue of justice comes from Robin Dillon. Like Slote, her concern is more with social institutions, structures, and hierarchies than with traits of character, and in fact these priorities lead her to be critical of virtue ethical theories which, she believes, cannot ask the right questions about virtues and vices (Dillon 2012, p. 86). However, she does accept the point that character traits matter, though she believes attending to the vices that allow and support social structures that allow for oppression and domination is more pertinent to feminist moral philosophy.

Lisa Tessman, on the other hand, accepts the basic framework of Aristotelian thinking about virtues of character, and with it the virtue of justice (Tessman 2005). However, she argues that oppressive social conditions can interfere in ways Aristotle did not anticipate with the formation of virtues of character and consequently (given Aristotle’s framework) with prospects for happiness (eudaimonia). One point of amendment, then, to Aristotelian thought is to recognize that oppressive social conditions may make other traits — traits that are important for liberatory struggle — into virtues. Another, congruent with other lines of feminist critique, is that Aristotle is insufficiently appreciative of the need for sensitivity to and response to suffering, so that something like the kind of supplementation recommended by care ethics is appropriate. A different model of response to the development of the virtue of justice specifically under non-ideal or unjust social conditions, one modeled on Kohlberg’s original architectonic understanding of the virtue, is defended by Jon Garthoff (Garthoff 2018).

Finally, in recent work Talbot Brewer has argued that a “revisionist” version of Aristotelian virtue ethics does a better job than competitors (including Kantian and contractualist theories) at recognizing the “irreplaceable value” of each human being (Brewer 2018). Brewer believes that a robust conception of the virtue of justice does important work for such a theory, not just focusing on distribution and allocation, but more generally establishing the space for virtuous recognition of ways that others can demand that we treat them (Brewer 2018, p. 25). Still, Brewer invokes Aquinas to argue that such justice is not enough, that that what is required is a recognition of a virtue of love to unify and perfect the other virtues of character.

While Rawls’ work has sparked an explosion of work in distributive justice and social justice more generally, in recent years a variety of strategies to return to a focus on justice as a personal virtue has emerged. These strategies vary across both dimensions we have considered, taking with various degrees of seriousness the connection between institutional and personal forms of justice, and focusing on the latter as a virtue, among (and like) other virtues.

One such strategy is that of Jon Drydyk, who builds on the “capability approach” to human welfare to make a case for a capabilities-based account of the justice of individual agents, in particular as against an “Aristotelian” approach that stresses justice as a matter of response to merit. Acting justly involves “striving to reduce and remove inequalities in people’s capabilities to function in ways that are elemental” to a truly human life (Drydyk 2012, pp. 31, 33). This is a “subsidiary” virtue account, in that we begin with a prior conception of the content of the requirements of justice, and conform the virtue to this conception. However, Drydyk emphasizes justice as a virtue of individuals, rather than institutions or societies. Drydyk’s strategy offers a counterpoint both to the Rawlsian way of thinking about just societies and to the ancient Greek way of thinking about justice as a virtue of individuals.

John Hacker-Wright argues that what is needed to replace a “legalistic” concern with moral status (as on modern liberal conceptions of justice) is instead an ethic of virtue with a different conception of the virtue of justice. Instead of a concern for the resolution of claims in something like reciprocal, contractual relations, Hacker-Wright’s conception of the virtue of justice is a matter of sensitivity to “vulnerability of value” in things, animate and otherwise. Thus, the threat of unjust — vicious -- wronging hangs not only over people who are sufficiently cognitively impaired so as not to perceive insults, but also corpses, animals, and even rare and valuable rock formations (p. 463). This counts as a sense of justice in that, on Hacker-Wright’s view it is not merely that we can act wrongly or viciously toward such entities, but (following Midgley 1983) that they can be wronged by us by our doing so. However, while Hacker-Wright claims that on a virtue ethic “The character of the agent is recognized as ineliminable in picking out facts as they figure in our moral deliberation,” this does not strictly speaking seem to be true, as prior to virtue there is value which it is up to the just or virtuous person to respond with sensitivity (Hacker-Wright 2007, pp. 461, 463, 464).

David Schmidtz and John Thrasher suggest rethinking the relationship between social justice and individual justice (Schmidtz and Thrasher 2014). Turning Plato’s account of justice in Republic on its head, they depict justice as a bridge between a virtue of the soul and of the polis : because we are essentially social, we need community, and justice is a matter of harmony with the community. On their view this is (largely) a matter of compliance with rules and institutions that enable people to live in harmony and flourish together.

An alternative proposal for thinking of the justice as a personal virtue ties it intimately to the experiences we have as emotional creatures. On this approach, instead of justice standing as distinct from “natural virtues” motivated by passions (as on Hume’s account), or needing to be replaced by sentimentally-driven attitudes such as care or compassion, justice is to be seen as a virtue largely constituted by emotion (Solomon 1994, Roberts 2010). The virtue amounts to a stable disposition of character to respond in the relevant ways to instances of injustice, perhaps consisting in those occasions in which one does not receive his or her due, and on the other hand to be disposed to a “will to give each his due” (Roberts 2010, p. 38). For Roberts, this is a will to realize “objective justice,” and as on other recent accounts, the virtue (and the passion) are theoretically subsidiary to this primary notion of “objective justice.”

There are also recent ventures in the spirit of the ancient Greek thinking about the individual virtue of justice. Rasmussen and Den Uyl (2005) argue for two interpersonal senses of justice (pp. 160-63). One is the familiar Aristotelian virtue. The second is a “metanormative” principle governing the institutions and legal frameworks in which individual agents (just and otherwise) live their lives and exercise their practical agency. The second of these senses of interpersonal justice does not draw its content from the exercise of virtue, but rather makes a place for it. The former does depend on virtue overall (including the exercise of practical wisdom) for its demands, but these are construed broadly in the traditional way of rendering to each his due. Bloomfield (2011) similarly suggests extending the Aristotelian virtue of justice, but in an inward direction, arguing that self-respect is necessary for happiness, and treating oneself fairly requires treating oneself fairly, as one treats others fairly, as a property of justice as individuals.

On the other hand, Wolterstorff (2008) argues that the eudaimonism of Greek thought prevents a proper appreciation for the nature and significance of justice and rights. Whether there is theoretical space remaining for a virtue of justice is not a question Wolterstorff considers, but he does believe there is no hope for an adequate grip on justice in an Aristotelian or Stoic framework.

Recent thinkers have grappled with the question of priority between formal principle and virtue that vexed Aristotle, and offered solutions that for the most part subordinate the virtue of justice to the prior notion of the justice of distributions, as Aristotle himself seems to have suggested. Bernard Williams claims explicitly that this is so (Williams 1980, p. 197), as does David Wiggins, in an attempt to bring a “pre-liberal,” Aristotelian conception of justice to bear on modern liberal conceptions, a la Kant and Rawls (Wiggins 2004). To do so, Wiggins distinguishes three senses of justice: (A) a matter of outcomes or states of affairs in which each gets what is due; (B) a disposition to promote justice (A); (C) a condition of the polis in virtue of which (A) is realized. Wiggins claims that the proper outcome of this collision of conceptions is one that recognizes a form of logical priority of justice (A) over justice (B) (p. 489). At the same time, against Williams he insists that the normative demands of justice (A) are “comprehensible” only within the perspective of a person with justice (B). And in fact he claims that a necessary condition on acts and outcomes satisfying the norms of justice (A) is that they be recognized to be so by those with the virtue of justice (B). Wiggins’ thinking here is not transparent, but perhaps the thought is that the logical point is purely formal: someone with justice (B) must, in act or judging justly, be responding to some norm which counts as justice (A). But, as merely formal, that tells us nothing about the substantive content of that norm. To get that, we have ineliminable need to refer to the judgment of the person with justice (B). That marks a way perhaps of restoring Aristotle’s focus on virtue in coming to understand the virtue of justice.

LeBar (2013, 2014) takes a similar tack in attempting to incorporate Kantian and post-Kantian insights into just demands on the treatment of others into an Aristotelian virtue framework. On his view, there is no way to specify the contents of the demands of justice, or to spell out its norms, independently of the wider possession and exercise of the virtues, including the virtue of practical wisdom. At the same time, what the virtuous and just person sees, in inhabiting a social world with equals in moral standing, are the norms which have become associated with the liberal conception: the standing to obligate others and hold them accountable, for example.

Finally, all of these are Western treatments of an individual virtue of justice. May Sim (Sim 2007, 2018) makes the case that there are informative parallels between the Confucian treatment of the virtues (in particular, yi) and the virtue of justice as adumbrated in Plato and Aristotle.

There are many different conceptions of the virtue of justice, and only some of them are distinctively virtue ethical. Many non-virtual ethical approaches put forward theories of virtue, and what distinguishes them from virtue ethics is that the given theory of virtue comes later in the order of explanation, rather than itself serving as the basis for understanding (all of) morality. This is especially the case with justice, where (as we have seen) it is naturally tempting to account for the norms of justice first and derive an account of the virtue in light of those norms. The question of the priority of norms of justice or the virtue of justice is likely to continue to generate exploration and debate, as is the question of how our lives as social and political animals contributes to understanding the virtue of justice. These vexed questions have inspired a profusion of views and no doubt will continue to do so.

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Beyond Intractability

The Hyper-Polarization Challenge to the Conflict Resolution Field: A Joint BI/CRQ Discussion BI and the Conflict Resolution Quarterly invite you to participate in an online exploration of what those with conflict and peacebuilding expertise can do to help defend liberal democracies and encourage them live up to their ideals.

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Hyper-Polarization, COVID, Racism, and the Constructive Conflict Initiative Read about (and contribute to) the  Constructive Conflict Initiative  and its associated Blog —our effort to assemble what we collectively know about how to move beyond our hyperpolarized politics and start solving society's problems. 

By Michelle Maiese

(Originally published July 2003, updated by Heidi Burgess June 2013 and again in April, 2017 and yet again in July, 2020.)  

Current Implications

You can tell by the number of times I have updated this essay, that the notion of "justice" keeps on coming up in the news. In the "Core Concepts" unit of our Conflict Fundamentals Massive Open Online Seminar (MOOS), we introduced the notion of "reconciliation" and examined John Paul Lederach's notion that reconciliation occurs through the meeting of 'peace, justice, truth, and mercy." But as becomes very clear in his exercise exploring these ideas, none of them are easy to understand.   More...

Justice Versus Fairness

In the context of conflict, the terms 'justice' and 'fairness' are often used interchangeably.

Taken in its broader sense, justice is action in accordance with the requirements of some law.[1] Some maintain that justice stems from God's will or command, while others believe that justice is inherent in nature itself. Still others believe that justice consists of rules common to all humanity that emerge out of some sort of consensus. This sort of justice is often thought of as something higher than a society's legal system. It is in those cases where an action seems to violate some universal rule of conduct that we are likely to call it "unjust."

In its narrower sense, justice is fairness. It is action that pays due regard to the proper interests, property, and safety of one's fellows.[2] While justice in the broader sense is often thought of as transcendental, justice as fairness is more context-bound. Parties concerned with fairness typically strive to work out something comfortable and adopt procedures that resemble rules of a game. They work to ensure that people receive their "fair share" of benefits and burdens and adhere to a system of "fair play."

The principles of justice and fairness can be thought of as rules of "fair play" for issues of social justice. Whether they turn out to be grounded in universal laws or ones that are more context-bound, these principles determine the way in which the various types of justice are carried out. For example, principles of distributive justice determine what counts as a "fair share" of particular good, while principles of retributive or restorative justice shape our response to activity that violates a society's rules of "fair play." Social justice requires both that the rules be fair, and also that people play by the rules.

People often frame justice issues in terms of fairness and invoke principles of justice and fairness to explain their satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the organizations they are part of, as well as their state or government.[3] They want institutions to treat them fairly and to operate according to fair rules. What constitutes fair treatment and fair rules is often expressed by a variety of justice principles.

Deserts, Equity, Equality, and Need

The principles of equity, equality, and need are most relevant in the context of distributive justice , but might play a role in a variety of social justice issues.[4] These principles all appeal to the notion of desert, the idea that fair treatment is a matter of giving people what they deserve. In general, people deserve to be rewarded for their effort and productivity, punished for their transgressions, treated as equal persons, and have their basic needs met. However, because these principles may come into conflict, it is often difficult to achieve all of these goals simultaneously.

According to the principle of equity, a fair economic system is one that distributes goods to individuals in proportion to their input. While input typically comes in the form of productivity, ability or talent might also play a role. People who produce more or better products...either by working harder, or by being more talented, this argument goes, should be paid more for their efforts than should people who produce less. Note that this sort of distribution may not succeed in meeting the needs of all members of society.

In addition, the idea that justice requires the unequal treatment of unequals is in tension with the principle of equality. This principle of egalitarianism suggests that the fairest allocation is one that distributes benefits and burdens equally among all parties. If there are profits of $100,000, and 10 people in the company, the principle of equality would suggest that everyone would get $10,000. This principle, however, ignores differences in effort, talent, and productivity. Also, because people have different needs, an equal initial distribution may not result in an equal outcome.

A principle of need, on the other hand, proposes that we strive for an equal outcome in which all society or group members get what they need. Thus poor people would get more money, and richer people would get less. This principle is sometimes criticized because it does not recognize differences in productive contributions or distinguish between real needs and purported needs.

Some have suggested that equity, equality, and need are not principles adopted for their own sake, but rather ones endorsed to advance some social goal.[5] For example, while equity tends to foster productivity, principles of equality and need tend to stress the importance of positive interpersonal relationships and a sense of belonging among society members.

Impartiality, Consistency, Standing, and Trust

Principles of justice and fairness are also central to procedural , retributive, and restorative justice. Such principles are supposed to ensure procedures that generate unbiased, consistent, and reliable decisions. Here the focus is on carrying out set rules in a fair manner so that a just outcome might be reached. Fair procedures are central to the legitimacy of decisions reached and individuals' acceptance of those decisions.

To ensure fair procedures, both in the context of legal proceedings, as well as in negotiation and mediation, the third party carrying out those procedures must be impartial. This means they must make an honest, unbiased decision based on appropriate information.[6] For example, judges should be impartial, and facilitators should not exhibit any prejudice that gives one party unfair advantages. The rules themselves should also be impartial so that they do not favor some people over others from the outset. 

An unbiased, universally applied procedure, whether it serves to distribute wealth or deliver decisions, can ensure impartiality as well as consistency. The principle of consistency proposes that "the distinction of some versus others should reflect genuine aspects of personal identity rather than extraneous features of the differentiating mechanism itself."[7] In other words, the institutional mechanism in question should treat like cases alike and ensure a level playing field for all parties.

The principle of standing suggests that people value their membership in a group and that societal institutions and decision-making procedures should affirm their status as members.[8] For example, it might follow from this principle that all stakeholders should have a voice in the decision-making process. In particular, disadvantaged members of a group or society should be empowered and given an opportunity to be heard. When decision-making procedures treat people with respect and dignity, they feel affirmed. A central premise of restorative justice , for example, is that those directly affected by the offense should have a voice and representation in the decision-making process regarding the aftermath of the offense--be it punishment and/or restitution.

Related to issues of respect and dignity is the principle of trust. One measure of fairness is whether society members believe that authorities are concerned with their well being and needs. People's judgments of procedural fairness result from perceptions that they have been treated "honestly, openly, and with consideration."[9] If they believe that the authority took their viewpoints into account and tried to treat them fairly, they are more likely to support and engage in the broader social system.

What is So Important about the Principles of Justice

It may seem to be a simple matter of common sense that justice is central to any well-functioning society. However, the question of what justice is, exactly, and how it is achieved are more difficult matters. The principles of justice and fairness point to ideas of fair treatment and "fair play" that should govern all modes of exchange and interaction in a society. They serve as guidelines for carrying out justice.

Not surprisingly, each of the principles of justice and fairness can be applied in a variety of contexts. For example, the principle of desert applies not only to the distribution of wealth, but also to the distribution costs and of punishments. "Environmental justice" is a relatively new term that examines and challenges the social tendency to site noxious facilities (such as landfills or polluting industries) in poor areas, but not affluent areas.  An unjust distribution of punishments is suggested by the statistics that people of color are disproportionately represented in prisons and on death row. (In 2012, people of color made up about 30 percent of the United States’ population, but accounted for 60 percent of those imprisoned.) [10]  Likewise, the principles of impartiality and consistency might apply to both an economic system and a decision-making body. And the principle of need plays a central role in both distributive and restorative justice.

In addition, we can also understand conflict in terms of tension that arises between the different justice principles. Conflict about what is just might be expressed as conflict about which principle of justice should be applied in a given situation or how that principle should be implemented.[11]  The ways of thinking about justice can have conflicting implications, leading to disputes about fairness. For example, some believe that an equitable distribution is the most fair, while others insist that a society's assets should be allocated according to need. A conflict may thus arise surrounding whether to base an economic system on productivity (those who work hardest should earn the most), identity (the rich are "job makers" and thus should get richer) or social welfare (the poor need help more, so the rich should get taxed to help raise the income of the poor). Similarly, some believe that those who violate the rights of others should receive their just deserts (paying a fine or going to prison), while others believe that our focus should be on the needs of victims and offenders (which can be protected through a restorative justice system). 

When principles of justice operate ineffectively or not at all, confidence in and organization's or the society's institutions may be undermined. Citizens or group members may feel alienated and withdraw their commitment to those "unjust" institutions. Or, they may rebel or begin a revolution in order to create new institutions.  This was the essence of the "Arab Spring" uprisings that began in 2010 and continue today (2013); it is also the essence of uprisings that have occurred off and on (though with much less intensity and violence) in Europe over the same time period.  If justice principles are applied effectively, on the other hand, organizations and societies will tend to be more stable and its members will feel satisfied and secure.

You can tell by the number of times I have updated this essay, that the notion of "justice" keeps on coming up in the news. In the "Core Concepts" unit of our Conflict Fundamentals Massive Open Online Seminar (MOOS), we introduced the notion of "reconciliation" and examined John Paul Lederach's notion that reconciliation occurs through the meeting of 'peace, justice, truth, and mercy." But as becomes very clear in his exercise exploring these ideas, none of them are easy to understand.  Justice, perhaps, is the most difficult.  

Justice is often taken to mean "fairness." But fairness to whom? Determined by whom? In Western cultures, "justice" is usually seen as "just deserts"—or getting what you deserve. If you break a law, you should be punished.  If you work hard, you should be rewarded.  Eastern cultures are more likely to embrace the notion of restorative justice, or restoring order to relationships, rather than punishment for misdeeds.

Different understandings of the meaning of justice underlie a lot of the disagreements we see in the United States right now regarding topics such as immigration, taxes, and health care. In the summer of 2020, the focus is on race.  What is "fair?" "Who should get what, and why?"  "Who should pay for it?" "What should happen when people break the law (for instance, enter or stay in the US illegally)? What should happen when police break the law?  Who has a voice? Who doesn't?

Understanding the different definitions of justice is a start to sorting out what you think about these questions—and what is likely to create the outcomes you want and need.

-- Heidi Burgess. July, 2020.

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[1] James. W. Vice, "Neutrality, Justice, and Fairness," (Loyola University Chicago, 1997).

[2] Nicholas Rescher, Distributive Justice . (Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, Inc., 1982), 5. < http://books.google.com/books?id=KCm4QgAACAAJ >. See also Rescher's Fairness: Theory & Practice of Distributive Justice (Transaction Publishers, 2002). < http://www.amazon.com/Fairness-Theory-Practice-Distributive-Justice/dp/0765801108 >.

[3] Tom R. Tyler and Maura A. Belliveau, "Tradeoffs in Justice Principles: Definitions of Fairness," in Conflict, Cooperation, and Justice , ed. Barbara B. Bunker and Jeffrey Z. Rubin, (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Inc. Publishers, 1995), 291. < http://www.amazon.com/Conflict-Cooperation-Justice-Inspired-Deutsch/dp/0787900699 >.

[4] For a discussion of justice in a recent, global context, see: Chris Armstrong, Global Distributive Justice: An Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 2012). < http://books.google.com/books?id=LJU0djAZ1osC >.

[5] Robert Folger, Blair H. Sheppard, and Robert T. Buttram, "Equity, Equality, and Need: Three Faces of Social Justice," in Conflict, Cooperation, and Justice , ed. Barbara B. Bunker and Jeffrey Z. Rubin, (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Inc. Publishers, 1995), 262. < http://www.amazon.com/Conflict-Cooperation-Justice-Inspired-Deutsch/dp/0787900699 >.

[6] Folger, Sheppard, and Buttram, 272.

[7] Folger, Sheppard, and Buttram, 272.

[8] Folger, Sheppard, and Buttram, 273.

[9] Tyler and Belliveau, 297.

[10] Kerby, "The Top 10 Most Startling Facts About People of Color and Criminal Justice in the United States: A Look at the Racial Disparities Inherent in Our Nation’s Criminal-Justice System." Center for American Progress.  Published March 13, 2012.  Accessed June 4, 2013 at  http://bit.ly/PMeeAG.

[11] Morton Deutsch, "Justice and Conflict," in The Handbook of Conflict Resolution: Theory and Practice , ed. Morton Deutsch and Peter Coleman (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, Inc., 2000), 54. More recent edition (2011) available here .

Use the following to cite this article: Maiese, Michelle. "Principles of Justice and Fairness." Beyond Intractability . Eds. Guy Burgess and Heidi Burgess. Conflict Information Consortium, University of Colorado, Boulder. Posted: July 2003 < http://www.beyondintractability.org/essay/principles-of-justice >.

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Justice for All

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…”

It would be easy to fault the Founders for not mentioning women in that statement, unless we remember that to their way of thinking, “men” and “mankind” were acceptable ways to describe groups that include men, women, and children. We might also fault them for allowing slavery to persist, even as they wrote a document about human freedom. What we should keep in mind, however, is that we base our belief that slavery is wrong on the very ideas embodied in the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution.

Even though some of their beliefs don’t fit our modern sensibilities, the Founders embraced world-changing ideas about justice and freedom. To appreciate this, it is helpful to understand how people were governed in the centuries before America’s Founding.

The scales of justice are a symbol for the justice system in the United States.

Throughout history, most people have been treated unequally by their rulers. Unless one were born into a privileged family or tribe, there was little access to the precious resources that are taken for granted in a prosperous society—things like meat, well-defended shelter, and education. In many cases people might be enslaved, or something close to it. People were treated unequally, both so that the powerful could have more comfort, and because rulers believed most people couldn’t be trusted to make decisions about how society should operate.

As we have seen, the Founders declared that no one has a right to rule others simply because of the family into which he’s born. Instead, they believed that everyone is born with certain rights and that the law should equally protect people’s freedoms and property.

“That alone is a just government,” wrote James Madison, “which impartially secures to every man, whatever is his own” (James Madison, “On Property,” 1792).

This was important to the Founders because they believed government exists not only to make rules; but also to ensure justice.

The Constitution protects justice for all citizens in the United States.

As American ideas about equality changed, we enacted laws to free American slaves and to extend voting rights to women and those without property. We moved to stop government agencies from treating African Americans unequally, whether by denying them the right to vote, denying them access to city-owned hospitals, or simply failing to extend to them the same police protection enjoyed by other citizens.

A long period of mistreatment had contributed to substantial poverty in African-American communities, and this was not the only inequality in the United States. A growing economy presents numerous opportunities for people to start new businesses, or find ways to earn money using their particular skills and ideas. Just as varied abilities (and sometimes luck) ensure that different players on a baseball team will score different numbers of runs—even when they’re all playing by the same rules—a free economy yields different rewards. It offers substantial benefits to everyone participating in it, but especially large rewards for people whose luck, skill, or perseverance makes them exceptional.

Despite the Great Depression and two world wars, Americans—even the poorest Americans—saw their standard of living rise tremendously during the twentieth century. Our understanding of equality and fairness was changing, however. While the Founders believed government should protect everyone’s  rights  impartially, many Americans came to believe that  outcomes  should be more equal. We began to take money from some individuals to give to others, and to offer special benefits, like preferential treatment for minority-owned firms seeking government contracts. In order to achieve more equitable outcomes, in other words, our government began to treat people unequally.

Some people see this as necessary to pursue equal treatment. Their point is that if the game has been rigged to keep some people from scoring, it is not fair to just start treating everyone equally, because some are now behind in the game. Efforts to redistribute wealth and adjust racial, ethnic, and gender proportions in workplaces and even sports teams are, they believe, necessary to achieve the Founders’ vision of a society where everyone has equal protection under the law.

This statue on front of a courthouse is holding the scales of justice and her eyes are covered. What do you think her blindfold represents?

Others argue that two wrongs do not make a right, and that we are punishing people who did nothing wrong for the sins of their ancestors. People are getting accustomed to living on government programs, they say, creating long-term dependency.

Americans disagree about what our government should do—if anything—given the unequal outcomes that naturally occur in a free society. Thankfully, the Founders crafted a political system we can use to work out our disagreements. What we should avoid, meanwhile, is taking for granted that we will always enjoy the equality our Founders promoted. We each depend on our government to protect our rights equally, but we have to remember that this depends, in turn, on citizens upholding that ideal.

For example, if we see someone who is charged with governing others—whether a senator, a mayor, or even a homeowners association president—allow favored members of the community to get by without following rules, or, worse still, make rules designed to hurt those they disfavor, we should question the justice of this.

Even if we turn out to be mistaken, citizens must be willing to ask such questions, if only to remind ourselves—and our elected officials—that equal treatment before the law is essential to freedom.

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By examining primary source documents, students will analyze the Founders’ concept of justice, liberty, and rights; where those concepts came from; and how they have changed over time.

Justice and Social Equity Critical Essay

Introduction, the concept of justice and social equity, threats to justice and social equity.

By virtue of the Stanford Encyclopedia of philosophy entries, both justice and social equity can be explained in relation to distributive justice and justice as a virtue. Justice can be defined as the concept of the rightness of morals. These morals are based on inter alia law, equity, ethics or natural law backed by sanctions in case of breach. On the other hand, social equity refers to the just and fair distribution of resources in a given society.

The concept of distributive justice is governed by normative principles that have been designed for purposes of guiding the allocation, as well as benefits and detriments of economic activity. The concept of distributive justice tends to observe strict egalitarianism that calls for the allocation of material goods in equal amounts to all.

For example, where a resource of public utility like electricity is in question, then all parts of the society should benefit from this resource as opposed to it being enjoyed by only a portion of members of the society.

Furthermore, distributive justice also maintains the ‘different principle’ that permits allocation in cases where it is contrary to strict equality, but its effect is not detrimental. This means that its effect must be in such a way that the least advantage in the society is in better condition materially than under the strict equality (Lamont 2007).

Justice as a virtue is further reflected in the Stanford Encyclopedia (Lamont 2007). It refers to individual’s traits that could be good or bad. The phrase is evidently ambiguous and may thus vary depending on individuals or social applications. Historically, both Aristotle and Plato’s perceptions of justice as a virtue proved that they were rationalists.

The two scholars employed the role of reason in their perception of what was just and fair. A good example is the fact that, it is considered unjust when one refuses to pay a debt or steals.

Ethical thinkers have thus supported the fact that, justice is not based on mere sentiments. Instead, they advocate for a more intellectual and constructive rational in determining what is just. More scholars have also presented their distinct opinions about justice as a virtue using both virtual and non-virtual approaches.

In his article, Frederickson reveals the existing connection between social equity and justice (2008). Additionally, he also outlays the challenges that befall social equity in both society and public administration. The author talks about Philip J. Rutledge in his leadership implemented in public administration and social equity (Frederickson 2008).

Evidently, social equity can be influenced by the changing attitudes existing towards fairness and governmental programs that are aimed at bringing equality. The challenges that affect social justice are said to be based on racial and gender prejudices, as opposed to existing economic differences. Ethnicity and race therefore puts the ‘poverty face’ on and also gives it an identity.

A good example in where it affects the Hispanic, African American, Indians and also native Americans who, according to the article, were only 3 percent of enrolled students in the University of California (Fredericks 2008).

In the book “The State of social equity in America Public Administration”, more is revealed about threats that are faced by social justice and equity. Over the years, public administration is said to have led the way when it comes to social equity.

Historically, this concept of social equality in public administration was emphasized on matters concerning service delivery, gender and race in employment as well as democratic participation. The situation has since then improved but still ought to be addressed because equity is today defined in a much broader way (Frederickson 2010).

In a nutshell, the concept of justice and social equity is inevitable when it comes to public administration and thus of high importance. Despite the fact that justice and social equity has improved over the years, there still exist certain threats that act as a stumbling block as discussed above.

Fredrickson, H. (2008). Social Equity in the Twenty-First Century: An Essay in Memory of Philip J. Rutledge. Journal of Public Affairs Education, 14(1): 1-8.

Fredrickson, H. (2010) . Social Equity and Public Administration: Origins, Developments and Applications. New York: M.E Sharpe.

Lamont, J. (2007). Distributive Justice . Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy . Web.

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IvyPanda. (2024, February 6). Justice and Social Equity. https://ivypanda.com/essays/justice-and-social-equity/

"Justice and Social Equity." IvyPanda , 6 Feb. 2024, ivypanda.com/essays/justice-and-social-equity/.

IvyPanda . (2024) 'Justice and Social Equity'. 6 February.

IvyPanda . 2024. "Justice and Social Equity." February 6, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/justice-and-social-equity/.

1. IvyPanda . "Justice and Social Equity." February 6, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/justice-and-social-equity/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Justice and Social Equity." February 6, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/justice-and-social-equity/.

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Justice, Equality and Constructivism: Essays on G.A. Cohen's ‘Rescuing Justice and Equality’– Brian Feltham (ed.)

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Thomas Porter, Justice, Equality and Constructivism: Essays on G.A. Cohen's ‘Rescuing Justice and Equality’– Brian Feltham (ed.), The Philosophical Quarterly , Volume 61, Issue 243, April 2011, Pages 434–437, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9213.2011.695_11.x

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G.A. Cohen once said that his career was marked by three long‐running philosophical disputes: with the Althusserians, with Robert Nozick, and with Ronald Dworkin. In all of these disputes he deployed a characteristic mastery of the finest conceptual detail and the sharpest logical manoeuvres. But perhaps his deepest contribution to political philosophy came later, after he had turned his attention to John Rawls' theory of justice. Justice, Equality and Constructivism , which is effectively a reprint of a special issue of the journal Ratio (Vol. 21 No. 4, December 2008), celebrates that contribution, bringing together six essays devoted to Cohen's monumental critique of Rawls in his Rescuing Justice and Equality (Harvard UP, 2008; hereafter Rescuing ).

Rescuing itself is divided into two parts. The first is a sustained attack on Rawls' difference principle, according to which inequalities in people's holdings of primary goods may be permitted by justice if those inequalities are necessary to increase the holdings of the worst off. The second diagnoses the error which, as Cohen sees it, underlies Rawls' endorsement of the difference principle. The diagnosis is that Rawls' favoured constructivist methodology is a kind of moral blender: it takes justice properly so called, adds to it such values as stability and publicity, mixes them all together with contingent facts about people and society and our current circumstances, and produces at the end a set of principles ready for implementation. All well and good, argues Cohen, but these are not fundamental principles of justice : they are merely rules of regulation .

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The Concept of Justice and Equality

On the dispute between john rawls and gerald cohen.

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• Language: English
• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Copyright year: 2015
• Audience: Sociologists, academics, institutes, libraries
• Front matter: 12
• Main content: 223
• Keywords: Difference principle ; reason ; egalitarianism ; social justice
• Published: September 25, 2015
• ISBN: 9783110448900
• Published: September 11, 2015
• ISBN: 9783110447194

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• Black Americans Have a Clear Vision for Reducing Racism but Little Hope It Will Happen

Many say key U.S. institutions should be rebuilt to ensure fair treatment

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• Black Americans see little improvement in their lives despite increased national attention to racial issues
• Few Black adults expect equality for Black people in the U.S.
• Black adults say racism and police brutality are extremely big problems for Black people in the U.S.
• Personal experiences with discrimination are widespread among Black Americans
• Black adults see voting as the most effective strategy for moving toward equality in the U.S.
• Some Black adults see Black businesses and communities as effective remedies for inequality
• Black Americans say race matters little when choosing political allies
• The legacy of slavery affects Black Americans today
• Most Black adults agree the descendants of enslaved people should be repaid
• The types of repayment Black adults think would be most helpful
• Responsibility for reparations and the likelihood repayment will occur
• Black adults say the criminal justice system needs to be completely rebuilt
• Black adults say political, economic and health care systems need major changes to ensure fair treatment
• Most Black adults say funding for police departments should stay the same or increase
• Acknowledgments
• Appendix: Supplemental tables
• The American Trends Panel survey methodology

Pew Research Center conducted this analysis to understand the nuances among Black people on issues of racial inequality and social change in the United States. This in-depth survey explores differences among Black Americans in their views on the social status of the Black population in the U.S.; their assessments of racial inequality; their visions for institutional and social change; and their outlook on the chances that these improvements will be made. The analysis is the latest in the Center’s series of in-depth surveys of public opinion among Black Americans (read the first, “ Faith Among Black Americans ” and “ Race Is Central to Identity for Black Americans and Affects How They Connect With Each Other ”).

The online survey of 3,912 Black U.S. adults was conducted Oct. 4-17, 2021. Black U.S. adults include those who are single-race, non-Hispanic Black Americans; multiracial non-Hispanic Black Americans; and adults who indicate they are Black and Hispanic. The survey includes 1,025 Black adults on Pew Research Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP) and 2,887 Black adults on Ipsos’ KnowledgePanel. Respondents on both panels are recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses.

Recruiting panelists by phone or mail ensures that nearly all U.S. Black adults have a chance of selection. This gives us confidence that any sample can represent the whole population (see our Methods 101 explainer on random sampling). Here are the questions used for the survey of Black adults, along with its responses and methodology .

The terms “Black Americans,” “Black people” and “Black adults” are used interchangeably throughout this report to refer to U.S. adults who self-identify as Black, either alone or in combination with other races or Hispanic identity.

Throughout this report, “Black, non-Hispanic” respondents are those who identify as single-race Black and say they have no Hispanic background. “Black Hispanic” respondents are those who identify as Black and say they have Hispanic background. We use the terms “Black Hispanic” and “Hispanic Black” interchangeably. “Multiracial” respondents are those who indicate two or more racial backgrounds (one of which is Black) and say they are not Hispanic.

Respondents were asked a question about how important being Black was to how they think about themselves. In this report, we use the term “being Black” when referencing responses to this question.

In this report, “immigrant” refers to people who were not U.S. citizens at birth – in other words, those born outside the U.S., Puerto Rico or other U.S. territories to parents who were not U.S. citizens. We use the terms “immigrant,” “born abroad” and “foreign-born” interchangeably.

Throughout this report, “Democrats and Democratic leaners” and just “Democrats” both refer to respondents who identify politically with the Democratic Party or who are independent or some other party but lean toward the Democratic Party. “Republicans and Republican leaners” and just “Republicans” both refer to respondents who identify politically with the Republican Party or are independent or some other party but lean toward the Republican Party.

Respondents were asked a question about their voter registration status. In this report, respondents are considered registered to vote if they self-report being absolutely certain they are registered at their current address. Respondents are considered not registered to vote if they report not being registered or express uncertainty about their registration.

To create the upper-, middle- and lower-income tiers, respondents’ 2020 family incomes were adjusted for differences in purchasing power by geographic region and household size. Respondents were then placed into income tiers: “Middle income” is defined as two-thirds to double the median annual income for the entire survey sample. “Lower income” falls below that range, and “upper income” lies above it. For more information about how the income tiers were created, read the methodology .

More than a year after the murder of George Floyd and the national protests, debate and political promises that ensued, 65% of Black Americans say the increased national attention on racial inequality has not led to changes that improved their lives. 1 And 44% say equality for Black people in the United States is not likely to be achieved, according to newly released findings from an October 2021 survey of Black Americans by Pew Research Center.

This is somewhat of a reversal in views from September 2020, when half of Black adults said the increased national focus on issues of race would lead to major policy changes to address racial inequality in the country and 56% expected changes that would make their lives better.

At the same time, many Black Americans are concerned about racial discrimination and its impact. Roughly eight-in-ten say they have personally experienced discrimination because of their race or ethnicity (79%), and most also say discrimination is the main reason many Black people cannot get ahead (68%).  

Even so, Black Americans have a clear vision for how to achieve change when it comes to racial inequality. This includes support for significant reforms to or complete overhauls of several U.S. institutions to ensure fair treatment, particularly the criminal justice system; political engagement, primarily in the form of voting; support for Black businesses to advance Black communities; and reparations in the forms of educational, business and homeownership assistance. Yet alongside their assessments of inequality and ideas about progress exists pessimism about whether U.S. society and its institutions will change in ways that would reduce racism.

These findings emerge from an extensive Pew Research Center survey of 3,912 Black Americans conducted online Oct. 4-17, 2021. The survey explores how Black Americans assess their position in U.S. society and their ideas about social change. Overall, Black Americans are clear on what they think the problems are facing the country and how to remedy them. However, they are skeptical that meaningful changes will take place in their lifetime.

Black Americans see racism in our laws as a big problem and discrimination as a roadblock to progress

Black adults were asked in the survey to assess the current nature of racism in the United States and whether structural or individual sources of this racism are a bigger problem for Black people. About half of Black adults (52%) say racism in our laws is a bigger problem than racism by individual people, while four-in-ten (43%) say acts of racism committed by individual people is the bigger problem. Only 3% of Black adults say that Black people do not experience discrimination in the U.S. today.

In assessing the magnitude of problems that they face, the majority of Black Americans say racism (63%), police brutality (60%) and economic inequality (54%) are extremely or very big problems for Black people living in the U.S. Slightly smaller shares say the same about the affordability of health care (47%), limitations on voting (46%), and the quality of K-12 schools (40%).

Aside from their critiques of U.S. institutions, Black adults also feel the impact of racial inequality personally. Most Black adults say they occasionally or frequently experience unfair treatment because of their race or ethnicity (79%), and two-thirds (68%) cite racial discrimination as the main reason many Black people cannot get ahead today.

Black Americans’ views on reducing racial inequality

Black Americans are clear on the challenges they face because of racism. They are also clear on the solutions. These range from overhauls of policing practices and the criminal justice system to civic engagement and reparations to descendants of people enslaved in the United States.

Changing U.S. institutions such as policing, courts and prison systems

About nine-in-ten Black adults say multiple aspects of the criminal justice system need some kind of change (minor, major or a complete overhaul) to ensure fair treatment, with nearly all saying so about policing (95%), the courts and judicial process (95%), and the prison system (94%).

Roughly half of Black adults say policing (49%), the courts and judicial process (48%), and the prison system (54%) need to be completely rebuilt for Black people to be treated fairly. Smaller shares say the same about the political system (42%), the economic system (37%) and the health care system (34%), according to the October survey.

While Black Americans are in favor of significant changes to policing, most want spending on police departments in their communities to stay the same (39%) or increase (35%). A little more than one-in-five (23%) think spending on police departments in their area should be decreased.

Black adults who favor decreases in police spending are most likely to name medical, mental health and social services (40%) as the top priority for those reappropriated funds. Smaller shares say K-12 schools (25%), roads, water systems and other infrastructure (12%), and reducing taxes (13%) should be the top priority.

Voting and ‘buying Black’ viewed as important strategies for Black community advancement

Black Americans also have clear views on the types of political and civic engagement they believe will move Black communities forward. About six-in-ten Black adults say voting (63%) and supporting Black businesses or “buying Black” (58%) are extremely or very effective strategies for moving Black people toward equality in the U.S. Smaller though still significant shares say the same about volunteering with organizations dedicated to Black equality (48%), protesting (42%) and contacting elected officials (40%).

Black adults were also asked about the effectiveness of Black economic and political independence in moving them toward equality. About four-in-ten (39%) say Black ownership of all businesses in Black neighborhoods would be an extremely or very effective strategy for moving toward racial equality, while roughly three-in-ten (31%) say the same about establishing a national Black political party. And about a quarter of Black adults (27%) say having Black neighborhoods governed entirely by Black elected officials would be extremely or very effective in moving Black people toward equality.

Most Black Americans support repayment for slavery

Discussions about atonement for slavery predate the founding of the United States. As early as 1672 , Quaker abolitionists advocated for enslaved people to be paid for their labor once they were free. And in recent years, some U.S. cities and institutions have implemented reparations policies to do just that.

Most Black Americans say the legacy of slavery affects the position of Black people in the U.S. either a great deal (55%) or a fair amount (30%), according to the survey. And roughly three-quarters (77%) say descendants of people enslaved in the U.S. should be repaid in some way.

Black adults who say descendants of the enslaved should be repaid support doing so in different ways. About eight-in-ten say repayment in the forms of educational scholarships (80%), financial assistance for starting or improving a business (77%), and financial assistance for buying or remodeling a home (76%) would be extremely or very helpful. A slightly smaller share (69%) say cash payments would be extremely or very helpful forms of repayment for the descendants of enslaved people.

Where the responsibility for repayment lies is also clear for Black Americans. Among those who say the descendants of enslaved people should be repaid, 81% say the U.S. federal government should have all or most of the responsibility for repayment. About three-quarters (76%) say businesses and banks that profited from slavery should bear all or most of the responsibility for repayment. And roughly six-in-ten say the same about colleges and universities that benefited from slavery (63%) and descendants of families who engaged in the slave trade (60%).

Black Americans are skeptical change will happen

Even though Black Americans’ visions for social change are clear, very few expect them to be implemented. Overall, 44% of Black adults say equality for Black people in the U.S. is a little or not at all likely. A little over a third (38%) say it is somewhat likely and only 13% say it is extremely or very likely.

They also do not think specific institutions will change. Two-thirds of Black adults say changes to the prison system (67%) and the courts and judicial process (65%) that would ensure fair treatment for Black people are a little or not at all likely in their lifetime. About six-in-ten (58%) say the same about policing. Only about one-in-ten say changes to policing (13%), the courts and judicial process (12%), and the prison system (11%) are extremely or very likely.

This pessimism is not only about the criminal justice system. The majority of Black adults say the political (63%), economic (62%) and health care (51%) systems are also unlikely to change in their lifetime.

Black Americans’ vision for social change includes reparations. However, much like their pessimism about institutional change, very few think they will see reparations in their lifetime. Among Black adults who say the descendants of people enslaved in the U.S. should be repaid, 82% say reparations for slavery are unlikely to occur in their lifetime. About one-in-ten (11%) say repayment is somewhat likely, while only 7% say repayment is extremely or very likely to happen in their lifetime.

Black Democrats, Republicans differ on assessments of inequality and visions for social change

Party affiliation is one key point of difference among Black Americans in their assessments of racial inequality and their visions for social change. Black Republicans and Republican leaners are more likely than Black Democrats and Democratic leaners to focus on the acts of individuals. For example, when summarizing the nature of racism against Black people in the U.S., the majority of Black Republicans (59%) say racist acts committed by individual people is a bigger problem for Black people than racism in our laws. Black Democrats (41%) are less likely to hold this view.

Black Republicans (45%) are also more likely than Black Democrats (21%) to say that Black people who cannot get ahead in the U.S. are mostly responsible for their own condition. And while similar shares of Black Republicans (79%) and Democrats (80%) say they experience racial discrimination on a regular basis, Republicans (64%) are more likely than Democrats (36%) to say that most Black people who want to get ahead can make it if they are willing to work hard.

On the other hand, Black Democrats are more likely than Black Republicans to focus on the impact that racial inequality has on Black Americans. Seven-in-ten Black Democrats (73%) say racial discrimination is the main reason many Black people cannot get ahead in the U.S, while about four-in-ten Black Republicans (44%) say the same. And Black Democrats are more likely than Black Republicans to say racism (67% vs. 46%) and police brutality (65% vs. 44%) are extremely big problems for Black people today.

Black Democrats are also more critical of U.S. institutions than Black Republicans are. For example, Black Democrats are more likely than Black Republicans to say the prison system (57% vs. 35%), policing (52% vs. 29%) and the courts and judicial process (50% vs. 35%) should be completely rebuilt for Black people to be treated fairly.

While the share of Black Democrats who want to see large-scale changes to the criminal justice system exceeds that of Black Republicans, they share similar views on police funding. Four-in-ten each of Black Democrats and Black Republicans say funding for police departments in their communities should remain the same, while around a third of each partisan coalition (36% and 37%, respectively) says funding should increase. Only about one-in-four Black Democrats (24%) and one-in-five Black Republicans (21%) say funding for police departments in their communities should decrease.

Among the survey’s other findings:

Black adults differ by age in their views on political strategies. Black adults ages 65 and older (77%) are most likely to say voting is an extremely or very effective strategy for moving Black people toward equality. They are significantly more likely than Black adults ages 18 to 29 (48%) and 30 to 49 (60%) to say this. Black adults 65 and older (48%) are also more likely than those ages 30 to 49 (38%) and 50 to 64 (42%) to say protesting is an extremely or very effective strategy. Roughly four-in-ten Black adults ages 18 to 29 say this (44%).

Gender plays a role in how Black adults view policing. Though majorities of Black women (65%) and men (56%) say police brutality is an extremely big problem for Black people living in the U.S. today, Black women are more likely than Black men to hold this view. When it comes to criminal justice, Black women (56%) and men (51%) are about equally likely to share the view that the prison system should be completely rebuilt to ensure fair treatment of Black people. However, Black women (52%) are slightly more likely than Black men (45%) to say this about policing. On the matter of police funding, Black women (39%) are slightly more likely than Black men (31%) to say police funding in their communities should be increased. On the other hand, Black men are more likely than Black women to prefer that funding stay the same (44% vs. 36%). Smaller shares of both Black men (23%) and women (22%) would like to see police funding decreased.

Income impacts Black adults’ views on reparations. Roughly eight-in-ten Black adults with lower (78%), middle (77%) and upper incomes (79%) say the descendants of people enslaved in the U.S. should receive reparations. Among those who support reparations, Black adults with upper and middle incomes (both 84%) are more likely than those with lower incomes (75%) to say educational scholarships would be an extremely or very helpful form of repayment. However, of those who support reparations, Black adults with lower (72%) and middle incomes (68%) are more likely than those with higher incomes (57%) to say cash payments would be an extremely or very helpful form of repayment for slavery.

• Black adults in the September 2020 survey only include those who say their race is Black alone and are non-Hispanic. The same is true only for the questions of improvements to Black people’s lives and equality in the United States in the October 2021 survey. Throughout the rest of this report, Black adults include those who say their race is Black alone and non-Hispanic; those who say their race is Black and at least one other race and non-Hispanic; or Black and Hispanic, unless otherwise noted. ↩

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Biden, Let the Protests of 1968 Be a Warning

Lessons from a tumultuous summer..

By Charles M. Blow

Produced by Jillian Weinberger

In 1968, protests against the Vietnam War reached a climax in Chicago outside the Democratic National Convention, where the police beat and arrested demonstrators — and most likely contributed to Hubert Humphrey’s loss in the general election that November. In this audio essay, the columnist Charles Blow draws a parallel between those events and this year’s convention, which will also take place in Chicago and where protesters are again planning demonstrations. Blow warns the Biden campaign that the growing campus protest movement signals what could come and that the campaign ignores history at its peril.

(A full transcript of this audio essay will be available within 24 hours of publication in the audio player above.)

Thoughts? Email us at [email protected] .

This episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Jillian Weinberger. It was edited by Kaari Pitkin and Annie-Rose Strasser. Mixing by Isaac Jones. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

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Charles M. Blow is an Opinion columnist for The New York Times, writing about national politics, public opinion and social justice, with a focus on racial equality and L.G.B.T.Q. rights. @ CharlesMBlow • Facebook

Advancing social justice, promoting decent work ILO is a specialized agency of the United Nations

The ILO Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work , adopted in 1998 and amended in 2022, is an expression of commitment by governments, employers' and workers' organizations to uphold basic human values - values that are vital to our social and economic lives. It affirms the obligations and commitments that are inherent in membership of the ILO, namely:

• freedom of association and the effective recognition of the right to collective bargaining;
• the elimination of all forms of forced or compulsory labour;
• the effective abolition of child labour;
• the elimination of discrimination in respect of employment and occupation; and
• a safe and healthy working environment.

Read the full text of the Declaration

Follow-up to the Declaration

The commitment is supported by a Follow-up procedure. The aim of the follow-up is to encourage the efforts made by the Members of the Organization to promote the fundamental principles and rights enshrined in the Constitution of the ILO and the Declaration of Philadelphia and reaffirmed in the 1998 Declaration.

This follow-up has two aspects based on existing procedures:

• The Annual follow-up concerning non-ratified fundamental Conventions will entail merely some adaptation of the present modalities of application of article 19, paragraph 5(e), of the Constitution.
• The Global Report on fundamental principles and rights at work that will serve to inform the recurrent discussion at the Conference on the needs of the Members, the ILO action undertaken, and the results achieved in the promotion of the fundamental principles and rights at work.

There is a third way to give effect to the Declaration, the Technical Cooperation Projects which are designed to address identifiable needs in relation to the Declaration and to strengthen local capacities thereby translating principles into practice.

Annual Review under the follow-up to the Declaration

Member States that have not ratified one or more of the fundamental ILO instruments directly relating to the principles and rights stated in the Declaration, including the Protocol of 2014 to the Forced Labour Convention, 1930 , are asked each year to report on the status of the relevant rights and principles within their borders. The reporting process provides governments and social partners with an opportunity to state what measures have been taken towards achieving respect for the Declaration, as well as to note impediments to ratification of the relevant instruments and areas where assistance may be required.

On the basis of the governments’ annual reports and observations by employers’ and workers’ organizations, the International Labour Office prepares and updates country baselines , which serve as a starting point to evaluate the extent to which the fundamental principles and rights at work are given effect in practice. The baselines also aim at facilitating the governments’ future reporting obligations.

• See all country baselines under the 1998 Declaration Annual Review

Five Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work

Freedom of association and the right of collective bargaining

Elimination of forced or compulsory labour

Abolition of child labour

Elimination of discrimination at work

A safe and healthy working environment

Integrated Strategy on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work 2017-2023

The teeth of the ILO - The impact of the 1998 ILO Declaration on Fundamentals Principles and Rights at Work

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Men Need a New Narrative. The Future of U.S. Democracy Depends on It

To counter harmful right-wing ideas of masculinity, the left must provide men with less cartoonish and more expansive models of strength and moral selfhood. here’s where to start..

The Washington Post published a long essay by Christine Emba last year about the masculinity crisis, one that created a sensation among the chattering classes and on social media. It garnered more than 10,000 responses in the comments section alone.

In the piece, titled “ Men are lost. Here’s a map out of the wilderness ,” Emba took readers on a guided tour of the many challenges facing contemporary American men, from well-documented labor market problems linked to deindustrialization and automation, to the feminization of higher education, to a general mental health crisis that included the revealing statistic that men account for three out of four “deaths of despair” (suicide, alcohol abuse, overdose). She also offered some insight into the rise of the anti-feminist public intellectual Jordan Peterson and other “right-aligned” masculinity gurus, from the mainstream to the fringe, and the ways in which they have simultaneously empathized with men’s loneliness and pain while capitalizing on their uncertainty and confusion in an era of feminism and LGBTQ+ progress, gaining “fame, notoriety and millions of book sales in the process,” Emba wrote.

For those of us who work in the pro-feminist “engaging men” space, little of this was new or surprising—although it was encouraging to see it featured in a prominent media outlet. The only minor quibble I have is that Emba neglected to mention the fact that a small but determined progressive movement dedicated to confronting many of the issues she raised—the pro-feminist men’s movement—has been around for nearly a half-century. And that since the 1990s, there has been an explosion of academic and journalistic research and writing about multicultural masculinities that provides a wealth of insight into the resoundingly positive transformations in men’s personal and professional lives catalyzed by feminism and other historic movements for social justice.

We can hold two thoughts in our head at the same time. We can be passionate about women’s rights and compassionate toward vulnerable boys and men. Richard Reeves

One of the more recent contributions was the publication in 2022 of the book Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It , by Brookings Institution scholar Richard Reeves. In this bestselling book, Reeves took pains to argue that focusing in an intersectional way on the struggles of boys and men in a patriarchal society does not entail neglecting the travails of girls and women. Perhaps anticipating the criticism that feminist-conscious men often face when they focus on the plight of men—especially white men—he wrote, “We can hold two thoughts in our head at the same time. We can be passionate about women’s rights and compassionate toward vulnerable boys and men.”

What Emba did exceptionally well in her wildly popular Post article was to situate contemporary debates about manhood within a broader discussion of the culture wars in American politics.

• On one side is the right, which has weaponized men’s anxieties by manufacturing a cast of villains, especially feminists and “elites,” and blaming them for emasculating men in a way that can only lead to civilizational ruin.
• On the other side are progressives and liberals, who, according to Emba, are hesitant to say much of anything about men, especially white men, much less speak empathetically about their struggles.

Why the reluctance? “The mid-2010s were the high-water mark of anti-male sentiment in progressive spaces,” Emba wrote. “As the #MeToo movement rose, with its tales of horrendous male behavior and ensuing corporate coverups, ‘ban men’ became a rallying cry. The word mas-culinity seemed to rarely appear without the descriptor toxic accompanying it, blamed for everything from rape culture to climate change. Even today, some progressives react touchily to any efforts to help men as a group.”

If trying to smash the patriarchy has left a vacuum in our ideal of masculinity, it also gives us a chance at a fresh start, an opportunity to take what is useful from models of the past and repurpose it for boys and men today. Christine Emba

In the political sphere, this reluctance has contributed to a troubling state in which millions of men, especially high school-educated white men, have felt unseen by or unwelcome in the Democratic Party. Emba quoted one Democratic strategist who said that his party was almost allergic to admitting that “some men might, in fact, be struggling in a unique way and could benefit from their own tailored attention and aid.”

The problem is that the Trumpified Republican Party, along with its champions and enablers on conservative talk radio and Fox News, takes the opposite tack. Their side has no qualms about celebrating men, especially white men, as the builders—and perhaps one day, the saviors—of Western civilization. The right has done next-to-nothing policy-wise to improve the material conditions of men’s lives, particularly working- and middle-class men. But dating back to the presidency of Richard Nixon, Republican politicians and their mouthpieces in conservative media have given those men cultural recognition and rhetorical respect as the “forgotten man” who is part of the “silent majority” that, they contend, made this country great.

They have done this, in part, by aggressively positioning themselves as the righteous defenders of embattled manhood . It’s a popular position on the right. In a 2023 national survey by the public opinion research group PerryUndem, 72 percent of Republican men agreed with the statement, “White men are the most attacked group in the country right now.”

In a widely covered speech in 2021, Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri wrapped his defense of men in a cloak of patriotic fervor. “The attack on men,” he declared, “has been the tip of the spear of the left’s broader attack on America.”

The speech resonated so well with many on the right—especially the Christian right—that in 2023 Hawley went on to publish a widely publicized book , deeply inflected with the language and sensibility of conservative Christianity, titled Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs .

In addition to the conservative politics and infotainment complex, expansion of the online misogynous “manosphere” has given anti-feminist men not only a voice but also an entire alternative universe of discourse. Jordan Peterson’s podcast has many millions of listeners, but it is only one of an interlocking and mutually reinforcing media ecosphere of podcasts, YouTube channels and TikTok videos that provide young men with a steady diet of anti-feminist cultural and political analysis. According to numerous published reports, the unabashedly misogynous former kickboxer Andrew Tate ’s content has been viewed—mostly by boys and young men—close to 12 billion times.

What is deeply worrying about all of this is not simply that young white men, or men in general, are unmoored and adrift in a time of rapid transformations in the gender and sexual order, and are thus vulnerable to the reactionary appeal of anti-feminist “manfluencers.” What might be worse is that when they vote, they are more likely than any other group to vote for far-right candidates at all levels of the political system, including president of the United States. In the 2020 presidential election, white men without a college degree voted for Donald Trump over Joe Biden by a staggering 70 to 28 percent, according to CNN exit polls, with similar numbers favoring Republican candidates in the 2022 midterms. (CNN also reported that Trump beat Biden only 51 to 48 percent among college-educated white men.)

For a variety of reasons, white women without a college degree have also played a role, but the GOP’s move to the extreme right has been led by white men. Simply stated, in a time of growing right-wing populist authoritarianism in the U.S. and elsewhere, the “masculinity crisis” has become a threat to democracy.

Christine Emba concluded her “Men are lost” essay with a plea for a “new model” of masculinity that has popular appeal. “If trying to smash the patriarchy has left a vacuum in our ideal of masculinity,” she wrote, “it also gives us a chance at a fresh start, an opportunity to take what is useful from models of the past and repurpose it for boys and men today.”

The urgency of this project was driven home by the findings of “ State of American Men ,” a fascinating 2023 report by the pro-equality organization Equimundo. One of the survey’s most startling conclusions was the “inconvenient truth” that in recent years a growing number of young men have been drawn to a restrictive, dominance-driven view of manhood precisely because it gives them a sense of meaning and purpose in a rapidly changing social landscape. This worldview, the report’s authors write, is “often more palatable than the confusion, constant self-reflection and necessary accountability that come with holding more equitable, connected, empathetic views about manhood.”

Over the past decade, a badly needed and wholly welcome surge in women’s political activity has produced a dramatic increase in the number of women from every ethnic and racial background being elected to office since 2017. At the same time, the impetus for the attacks on democracy has come from men, including men in right-wing media who use the predictable tactic of presenting themselves as “manly” and “strong” and their opponents as “soft” and “weak.”

In the face of this sort of politicized bullying, it seems necessary to provide a voice for men with less cartoonish and more expansive views about strength and moral selfhood.

In that spirit, I want to outline some of the ways in which men whose politics are to the left of center can do their part to counteract the right’s success in playing identity politics with white male voters. The idea is to mobilize these men as men in the service of progressive, liberal and feminist ideals of fairness, equity and justice—and thus to articulate an alternative conception of men’s strength that does not rely on the regressive and tired trope that equates being a “real man” with being a social and political conservative.

Resisting Authoritarianism

Democracy is under threat in the U.S. and Europe from extremist right-wing populist movements that have sought to roll back democratic progress with ethnonationalist and racist appeals. But right-wing populism also attracts support from men, especially white men, who feel disrespected and left behind by the advancement of women and societal progress on LGBTQ+ rights and inclusivity.

The alarming slide in this country toward autocracy and/or some form of democratic erosion has been facilitated by the sometimes overwhelming majorities of (mostly white) male voters who vote for authoritarian right-wing candidates and back efforts to suppress voting rights for historically marginalized groups. Regressive ideas about manhood underlie this anti-democracy movement.

Especially in light of 20th-century history, it is apparent that many right-wing voters, the majority of whom are white men, find comfort in regressive “strongman” politics and the very conservative gender norms that underlie them. But authoritarian governance is not a reasonable—or rational—solution to the problems of complex societies with great racial, sexual and gender diversity.

Men who embrace democracy, in all its messiness and with all of its challenges, have an important role to play in the struggle against authoritarianism. We need more of their voices in public discourse, especially because extremist right-wing movements have successfully convinced millions of working- and lower-middle-class white men to support plutocratic rule by appealing to their sense of aggrieved entitlement.

As income inequality grows, these men have been told repeatedly in right-wing media echo chambers that feminists, advocates of multiculturalism and other “woke” social justice warriors are the source of their problems, rather than concentrated corporate power and other conservative macroeconomic forces. We need more men who can function as trusted messengers and are willing to chal-lenge this crude scapegoating and put the focus where it belongs: on plutocracy and its faithful servants on the right in politics and the judiciary.

The Fight For Reproductive Justice

Abortion rights and reproductive justice are issues of basic human rights and bodily autonomy for women and others with the capacity to become pregnant. The movement for reproductive justice has long been led by a multiracial, multiethnic collective of women. The vast majority of passionate activists are women. But men and nonbinary people have a vital role to play as well.

For the past half-century, millions of men have supported women’s right to abortion, both in their private lives and at the ballot box. Some have donated money. Some have participated in public demonstrations, including the historic Women’s Marches in 2017. Many men have provided personal assistance and care for women close to them who have experienced unintended pregnancies and needed access to a comprehensive range of medical care and services. But nowhere near enough of them have made this issue a priority.

Since an activist right-wing U.S. Supreme Court dominated by justices with deeply conservative beliefs about sex and gender overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, the women-led reproductive justice movement has gathered significant momentum. One of its main goals is to mobilize abortion-rights supporters, including young people, to use their power at the bal-lot box. Most political discourse about the latent political power of the pro-abortion majority focuses on women, especially Gen Z women, who are anticipated to vote in greater numbers than usual in the 2024 presidential election because of the galvanizing force of the abortion-rights issue.

But men are involved before, during and after conception. In a hopeful sign, the Equimundo survey found that nearly two-thirds of men ages 18 to 45 believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases. Now they just need to make reproductive justice a central factor in their choice of whether and how to get involved politically, and which candidates/parties to support.

Countering Political Violence

Violence and overt displays of misogyny in American political rhetoric and practice have increased markedly in recent years. Even before the violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, it had become more common for far-right militias and other men in military-style gear to appear at protests related to COVID-19 restrictions and Black Lives Matter protests outside statehouses across the country, armed with semiautomatic firearms. But although men commit the overwhelming majority of political violence , very little mainstream commentary about the rise of political violence in the U.S. explores the gendered dimensions of this violence—and how cultural beliefs about manhood factor in.

Whether they act as individuals or as part of right-wing militias, men on the right who use violence are often motivated by the belief that “real men” are authorized to use violence when necessary to protect their families and their country. The American political debate badly needs a much louder voice for men who do not accept these sorts of self-serving rationalizations, and who reject the use of violence in politics not only as counterproductive but as threats to democracy itself.

There has also been a notable uptick in openly misogynous and violent rhetoric directed toward women politicians. It should go without saying that the use of violent intimidation is antithetical to democratic norms and is incompatible with a functioning democracy. But (men’s) violence against women in politics, according to political scientist Mona Lena Krook, is something more. It is “an attempt to exclude women as women from participating in political life,” she contends. All the more reason that men as men who believe in democratic principles need to denounce it.

Mobilizing men in the ways outlined above will not be easy. Many men are uncertain how to exercise strong, self-assured and proactive leadership on potentially complex and sensitive social and political issues, especially those that include matters related to gender or sexual rights. For whatever reason, many of them have felt uncomfortable with or alienated from either mainstream politics or progressive social movements. Organizations that are engaged in advocacy work or electoral politics can contribute materially to the protection of American democracy and the advancement of progressive goals by involving these men.

This isn’t a call for special treatment for a group—specifically white men—who already command a disproportionate share of attention in politics and media. It’s a call to do what’s necessary for the continued health and vitality of our troubled and teetering democracy.

Men and Mass Shootings 25 Years After Columbine

The Perception Paradox: Men Who Hate Feminists Think Feminists Hate Men

Taylor Swift Is a Threat to the Right—and So Is Travis Kelce

U.S. democracy is at a dangerous inflection point—from the demise of abortion rights, to a lack of pay equity and parental leave, to skyrocketing maternal mortality, and attacks on trans health. Left unchecked, these crises will lead to wider gaps in political participation and representation. For 50 years, Ms . has been forging feminist journalism—reporting, rebelling and truth-telling from the front-lines, championing the Equal Rights Amendment, and centering the stories of those most impacted. With all that’s at stake for equality, we are redoubling our commitment for the next 50 years. In turn, we need your help, Support Ms . today with a donation—any amount that is meaningful to you . For as little as $5 each month , you’ll receive the print magazine along with our e-newsletters, action alerts, and invitations to Ms . Studios events and podcasts . We are grateful for your loyalty and ferocity .

About Jackson Katz

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I'm a former JP Morgan exec who now works to distribute basic income payments to those in need. Here's why I do it.

• Wole Coaxum is the CEO of MoCaFi, which has distributed over $52 million in basic income payments.
• Coaxum, a former JP Morgan exec, was inspired by social justice movements in the Black community.
• He wanted to create a pathway for economic equality to uplift vulnerable populations.

This is an As Told To essay based on a conversation with Wole Coaxum, the founder and CEO of MoCaFi , a B Corporation that has distributed over $52 million worth of guaranteed basic income payments nationwide. It has been edited for length and clarity.

I was very fortunate in my career to be one of the most senior people at JP Morgan. I was a managing director and the number two guy in business banking nationally when I saw the images coming out of Ferguson . I thought, "It's 2014, and what we're seeing is no different than what was going on in 1968."

The people protesting were making a statement, and it was coming out of a place of wanting change. I thought, "How can I use my time and talents, which is financial services, to bring an economic justice agenda to the social justice agenda?" And that inspired me to start MoCaFi.

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Martin Luther King, Jr. talked about universal basic income and guaranteed basic income just before he passed away, and I feel that we as a company are very fortunate to be standing on the shoulders of others to bring these powerful ideas into the marketplace.

We've done about a dozen UBI and GBI programs around the country. We've facilitated programs in Los Angeles, Atlanta, and San Francisco, among others. Some of them are through MGI, Mayors for a Guaranteed Income . We're finding that what we're doing resonates with cities and counties. They see the value of it.

One of the things I would say in response to the red states opposing this is we're not a political entity. We're just trying to provide a high-quality platform that ensures that a UBI or GBI program fulfills its mission so that the individuals have access to the cash and can move forward. It's hard to argue with the idea of getting resources from government to people more efficiently. Even my most conservative friends can get behind a more efficient government.

We are facilitating payments in a way that reduces all the friction. We have a disbursement platform, and then we have a demand deposit account. We're trying to take individuals receiving a UBI and GBI and bring financial coaching and resources to them. They don't have to operate in cash or cash checks. They can create a MoCaFi bank account that's FDIC-insured. We can open up accounts for undocumented people. We can open up accounts for people regardless of their credit score. Now, they've got a pathway to economic stability.

There's an old narrative demonizing low-income people who receive government resources. That's the wrong lens in my personal view. Most, if not all, Americans are getting some benefit from the federal government. Why is a universal basic income that much different? Why not streamline the process so the most vulnerable among us can get access to those funds?

People use the money for the intended purpose. It increases savings. It decreases poverty. It increases education. It reduces the need for crime. It gives people more dignity. It makes our neighborhoods safer. It enables families to get jobs they couldn't get otherwise because they're paying for childcare or healthcare. The proof is in the pudding.

Watch: There are real people behind the data, says JPMorgan Chase's CMO — which is why personalization is so important

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