Justice, Democracy and the Right to Justification

Front matter

CRITICAL POWERS

Justice, Democracy and the Right to Justification

Rainer Forst in Dialogue

Part 2 Responses Andrea Sangiovanni 3 The Power of Justification Amy Allen

4 Complexities of Political Discourse: Class, Power and the Linguistic Turn Kevin Olson 5 The Practice of Equality Anthony Simon Laden

6 The Boundary Problem and the Right to

Justification Eva Erman

7 Justice and the Basic Right to Justification Simon Caney

Part 3 Reply 8 Justifying Justification: Reply to My Critics Rainer Forst Bibliography Author Index Subject Index vi viii

217 231 233

List of Contributors

Amy Allen is professor of philosophy and women’s and gender studies, and Parents Distinguished Research Professor in the Humanities, at Dartmouth College, where she has taught since 1997. Prof Allen is co-editor-in-chief of Constellations, series editor of the Columbia University Press series New Directions in Critical Theory, and executive co-director of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP). Her most recent book is The Politics of Ourselves (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).

Simon Caney is professor in political theory, university lecturer, director of the Centre for the Study of Social Justice, and fellow and tutor in politics, Magdalen College. His most recent book is Climate Ethics: Essential Readings (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010) co-edited with Stephen Gardiner, Dale Jamieson and Henry Shue.

Eva Erman is associate professor in the Department of Government at Uppsala University and chief editor of Ethics & Global Politics. Her most recent book is Political Equality in Transnational Democracy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) co-edited with Sofia Näsström.

Rainer Forst is professor of political theory and philosophy at the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main. He serves as co-director of the Research Cluster “The Formation of Normative Orders’ and the Research Centre ‘Justitia Amplificata’ in Frankfurt. He is an associate editor of Ethics. In 2012, he received the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize, the highest honour awarded to German researchers. His most recent books are Toleration in Conflict (Cambridge University Press, 2013) and Justification and Critique (Polity, 2013).

Anthony Laden is professor of philosophy, and chair, of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Illinois, Chicago. His most recent book is Reasoning: A Social Picture (Oxford University Press, 2012).

List of Contributors vii

Kevin Olson is associate professor in political science at the University of California, Irvine. His most recent book is the edited work Adding Insult to Injury: Nancy Fraser Debates Her Critics (London: Verso, 2008).

Andrea Sangiovanni is senior lecturer in philosophy at King’s College, London. His book Domains of Justice is forthcoming with Harvard University Press.

Series Editor’s Foreword

Morality, Politics and the Right to Justification

Rainer Forst’s lead essay for this volume “Two Pictures of Justice’ exemplifies the theoretical stance that he has been developing since his first book Contexts of Justice in its rejection of what Iris Young called ‘the distributive paradigm’ that has been largely dominant within ‘analytic’ political philosophy over the past 40 years. Contrasting this picture of justice - which foregrounds the question of who gets what - with a picture that is focused on the question of how you are treated, your standing in intersubjective structures and relationships, Forst argues for the primacy of the second picture in which justice concerns relations between agents that are structured by power. The distributive picture, Forst contends, misleads us in a variety of respects, notably concerning the relationship between morality and justice, particularly the differentiation of humanitarian obligations and duties of justice, and most fundamentally by failing to connect justice and the subjects of justice in a way that acknowledges their standing as agents of justice.

It is perhaps unsurprising that behind the seemingly simple contrast between the two pictures to which Forst attends in this lead essay are a range of debates in moral and political philosophy on which he has developed a distinctive and sophisticated position that is most fully developed in his recent collection The Right to Justification - and because many of these responses to Forst’s essay focus on its foundations and implications rather than simply the contrast that it draws, it may be helpful to briefly sketch how his wider view animates and drives the argument presented here.

In his work, Forst has developed a Kantian form of practical philosophy whose heart is a conception of human beings as rational subjects who are agents of justification. Practical reason, on Forst’s

Series Editors Foreword ix account, is most fundamentally the capacity to offer appropriate kinds of justifying reasons in response to practical questions, where ‘appropriateness’ is specified by the kind of practical context in question considered as a context of justification. Forst develops this account in characterizing the relationship between reason and morality as one in which the categorical validity of moral norms is to be understood as grounded in their reciprocal and general justification across all human beings. Crucially, for Forst, only reasons that cannot be reasonably - reciprocally and generally - rejected can ground moral norms, where this entails that each and every human being is entitled to raise objections to the claim of any given norm (including those of reciprocity and generality themselves which must be recursively justified). Moral persons, that is, have a right to justification and a duty of justification as members of the universal moral community.

In contrast to the moral context, political contexts are not universal in this way (although a political context may, as a contingent matter, encompass all human beings). Rather a social context is political when it involves an order of justification comprised of the norms and institutions through which some set of persons govern their social relationships to one another. Political contexts thus fundamentally concern relations of rule and the relative standing of persons in relation to one another with respect to relations of rule. The political point of justice, for Forst, as an overarching virtue of such orders of justification is as an emancipatory demand directed at arbitrary rule, where ‘arbitrariness’ is specified in terms of relations of (formal or informal) rule that cannot be generally and reciprocally justified to those subject to these relations. Thus, the first question of justice is power, the power relationships to which persons are subject and the powers of justification that they enjoy in shaping and contesting structures and relations of rule.

This political conception of justice entails that the first task of justice consists in the construction of a basic structure of justification (what Forst calls ‘fundamental justice’) in which all subject to the order of justification have an equal right to justification (expressed as a qualified veto right) concerning the rule to which they are subject (only then can x Series Editor’s Foreword they experience themselves as both authors and subjects of political rule, as rulers and ruled). The establishment of a basic structure of justification then allows for the development of a justified basic structure (what Forst terms ‘maximal or full justice’). It is a notable feature of this constructivist conception of justice that it is both substantive in being grounded ultimately in the moral right to justification and procedural in that justified norms of justice are specified through a democratic procedure. However, it is also pertinent to note that, in contrast to the Anglo-American debate about whether justice is confined to states or extends to a global community, Forst’s conception of justice tracks contexts and relations of rule in various forms that they take - subnational, national, supranational, transnational, global. Justice, on his conception, is not tied to a particular type of political institution (e.g. the state) but it is tied to political structures and relations of rule (in contrast to those who automatically equate the scope of justice and of morality) and claims of justice, as opposed to claims of, for example, humanitarian aid, can arise wherever the structures and relations of rule in question are not reciprocally and generally justified to those subject to them. This distinctive feature of Forst’s account is acutely relevant for the contexts of plural and multilevel governance of the contemporary world.

David Owen

Part One Lead Essay

Rainer Forst Professor of Political Theory and Philosophy Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany

1. At various times, human beings have made depictions of justice. She appears as the goddess Diké or Justitia, sometimes with, sometimes without a blindfold, though invariably with the sword and symbols of even-handedness and non-partisanship; one need only think, for example, of Lorenzetti’s ‘Allegory of Good Government’ in the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena. Mostly she is depicted as beautiful and sublime, yet at other times also as hard and cruel, as in Klimt’s famous paintings for Vienna University (which were destroyed during the war).

Studying such representations is a fascinating enterprise.’ However, the understanding of ‘picture’ which informs my remarks is a different, linguistic, one. In his Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein writes: ‘A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.” A picture of this kind shapes our language in a particular way, brings together the various usages of a word and thus constitutes its ‘grammar’. But such pictures can also point our understanding in the wrong direction,

' ©. R. Kissel, Die Justitia: Reflexionen über ein Symbol und seine Darstellung in der bildenden Kunst. Munich: Beck, 1984; D. E. Curtis and J. Resnik, ‘Images of Justice, Yale Law Journal 96, (1987), 1727-72.

2 L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. by G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1968, p. 48 ($115); on this, see H. F. Pitkin, Wittgenstein and Justice. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972, pp. 91f., 287ff. An interesting application of the idea of ‘being held captive by an aspect’ can be found in D. Owen, ‘Criticism and Captivity: On Genealogy and Critical Theory, European Journal of Philosophy 10(2), (2002), 216-30.

much as, in viewing the famous picture puzzle of a duck and a rabbit, one can see only one aspect at a time,’ or as our thinking is held captive by particular examples that lead us to false generalizations.‘

In what follows, I would like to discuss two ways of thinking about justice, one of which I want to argue inadmissibly limits and simplifies our understanding of justice, and indeed leads it in a wrong direction. I prefer to regard these two competing notions of justice as ‘pictures’ because they bring together a wealth of conceptions and images, and not only of justice, but also in particular of injustice. The latter seems to be the more concrete, immediate phenomenon, being associated with stories and images of the oppressed, the wretched and the downtrodden. Thus a ‘picture of justice’ stands for a very general and at the same time ‘thick’ and concrete way of thinking about justice and injustice.

2. The picture that holds our thinking concerning social or distributive justice ‘captive’ is the result of a particular interpretation of the ancient principle suum cuique - “To each (or from each) his owr - which has been central to our understanding of justice since Plato and is interpreted in such a way that the primary issue is what goods individuals justly receive or deserve - in other words, who ‘gets’ what. This then leads either to comparisons between people's sets of goods, and thus to relative conclusions, or to the question of whether individuals have ‘enough’ of the essential goods, regardless of comparative considerations. Granted, these goods- and distribution-centred, recipient-oriented points of view have their merits, for distributive justice is, of course, concerned with the goods individuals can appropriately claim. Nevertheless, this picture obscures essential aspects of justice. In the first place, the question of how the goods to be distributed come into existence is neglected in a purely goods-focused view; hence, issues of production and its just organization are largely ignored. Furthermore, there is the second problem that the political question of who determines the structures of production and distribution and in what ways is disregarded or downplayed, as though

> Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, p. 194. 4 ‘A main cause of philosophical disease - a one-sided diet: one nourishes one’s thinking with only one kind of example’ Ibid., p. 155 ($593).

a great distribution machine - a neutral ‘distributor’ - could exist that only needs to be programmed correctly using the right ‘metric of justice.® But, according to the picture of justice I propose, it is essential that there should not be such a machine, because it would mean that justice could no longer be understood as a political accomplishment of the subjects themselves but would turn them into passive recipients of goods - not of justice. This way of thinking also neglects, in the third place, the fact that justified claims to goods do not simply ‘exist’ but can be arrived at only through discourse in the context of corresponding procedures of justification in which - and this is the fundamental requirement of justice — all can in principle participate as free and equal individuals (as I will argue below on the basis of a discourse-theoretical interpretation of the alternative picture of justice).

Finally, in the fourth place, the goods-fixated view of justice also largely leaves the question of injustice out of account; for, by concentrating on overcoming deficiencies in the distribution of goods, someone who suffers want as a result of a natural catastrophe is equivalent to someone who suffers want as a result of economic or political exploitation. Although it is correct that help is required in both cases, according to my understanding of the grammar of justice, in the one case it is required as an act of moral solidarity, in the other as an act of justice conditioned by the nature of one’s involvement in relations of exploitation and injustice and the specific wrong in question.’ Hence, there are different grounds for action as well as different kinds of action which are required. Ignoring this difference can lead to a

° Ina telling phrase of Gerald A. Cohen, ‘Afterword to Chapters One and Two, in ibid., On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice and Other Essays in Political Philosophy, ed. by M. Otsuka. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011, p. 61.

For the first two points, see esp. I. M. Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990; and my ‘Radical Justice: On Iris Marion Young’s Critique of the Distributive Paradigm, Constellations 14(2), (2007c), 260-5. Young’s decision to call the criticized paradigm ‘distributive’ often leads to the misunderstanding that she was concerned with ‘political rather than ‘social’ or distributive justice, which is not the case.

Here a whole series of cases would have to be distinguished: direct participation in or (joint) causation of injustice; indirect participation in injustice by profiting from it without oneself actively contributing to relations of exploitation; and the (‘natural’) duty to put an end to unjust relations, even if one does not benefit from them but possesses the means to overcome them.

situation where - in a dialectic of morality, as it were* - what is actually a requirement of justice is seen as an act of generous assistance or ‘aid.

A critique of such a dialectic can already be found in Kant:

Having the resources to practice such benevolence as depends on the goods of fortune is, for the most part, a result of certain human beings favoured through the injustice of the government, which introduces an inequality of wealth that makes others need their beneficence. Under such circumstances, does a rich man’s help to the needy, on which he so readily prides himself as something meritorious, really deserve to be called beneficence at all??

For all of these reasons, it is especially important when dealing with questions of distributive justice to recognize the political point of justice and to liberate oneself from a one-sided picture fixated on quantities of goods (or on a measure of well-being to be produced by them). On a second, fuller and more apt picture, by contrast, justice must be geared to intersubjective relations and structures, not to subjective or putatively objective states of the provision of goods or of well-being. Only in this way, by taking into consideration the first question of justice - namely, the question of the justifiability of social relations and, correspondingly, how much ‘justification power individuals or groups have in a political context - can a radical, critical conception of justice be developed, one which gets at the roots of relations of injustice. In short, the basic question of justice is not what you have but how you are treated.'°

3. What might justify one in speaking of a misleading or ‘false’ as opposed to a more ‘apt’ picture of justice, given that the goods- or recipient-centred notion can appeal to the time-honoured principle

* See my The Right to Justification: Elements of a Constructivist Theory of Justice, trans. by J. Flynn. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012, ch. 11.

° I. Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, ed. and trans. by M. J. Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, p. 203.

1 Derek Parfit’s distinction between a ‘telic and a ‘deontic egalitarian view captures important aspects of these different ways of thinking about justice, and it is interesting to note that - without commenting explicitly on this - he uses the term justice only in connection with the deontic view. See his “Equality or Priority?, in M. Clayton and A. Williams (eds), The Ideal of Equality. Houndsmill: Macmillan, 2002, p. 90.

of suum cuique? Is there, in contrast to this, a more original, deeper meaning of justice which the alternative picture captures more fully? In my opinion there is. Consider the very concept of justice. That concept possesses a core meaning to which the essential contrasting concept is that of arbitrariness,’ understood in a social and political but not a metaphysical sense - that is, assuming the form of arbitrary rule by individuals or by a part of the community (e.g. a class) over others, or of the acceptance of social contingencies which lead to social subordination and domination and are rationalized as an unalterable fate, even though they are nothing of that sort. A metaphysical conception of arbitrariness in the context of social justice would go further and aim to eradicate or compensate for all differences between persons giving them an advantage over others due to brute luck, regardless of whether these differences lead to social domination.” This goes too far according to the second picture of justice; justice must remain a human task aiming at non-domination, not one for the gods aiming at a world free from natural or historical contingency. Arbitrariness as domination is a human vice of injustice, contingency generally is a fact of life.

The term ‘domination’ is important in this context, for it signifies the arbitrary rule of some over others - that is, rule without proper reasons and justifications and (possibly) without proper structures of justification existing in the first place, and when people engage in struggles against injustice, they are combating forms of domination

See also John Rawls’s definition in A Theory of Justice, rev. edn. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999a, p. 5.

Without being able to go into details here, I concur with the critiques of ‘luck egalitarianism by E. Anderson, “What is the Point of Equality? Ethics 109(2), (1999), 287-337; and S. Scheffler, “What is Egalitarianism?; in ibid., Equality and Tradition: Questions of Value in Moral and Political Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010, pp. 175-207. As both of them show, luck egalitarianism is a cousin of libertarianism in that it accepts the results of free choice (or ‘option luck’) as just, while ‘victims’ of ‘misfortune are seen as (passive and needy) recipients of compensation. I do not think, however, that the major difference between these views is to be located in the concept of equality; rather, it stems from two very different ways of thinking about justice.

3 I explain the difference between such a discourse-theoretical understanding of domination and a neo-republican one based on freedom of choice in my ‘A Kantian Republican Conception of Justice as Non-Domination, in A. Niederberger and P. Schink (eds), Republican Democracy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013b.

of this kind. The basic impulse that opposes injustice is not primarily one of wanting something, or more of something, but is instead that of not wanting to be dominated, harassed or overruled in one’s claim to a basic right to justification." This moral right expresses the demand that no political or social relations should exist that cannot be adequately justified towards those involved. This constitutes the profoundly political essence of justice, which is not captured, but is suppressed, by the recipient-focused interpretations of the principle suum cuique. The core issue of justice is who determines who receives what, that is, the question answered in Plato in terms of the ideas of the supreme good and the philosopher king.” In my picture, the demand for justice is an emancipatory one; reflexively speaking, it rests on the claim to be respected as a subject of justification, that is, to be respected in one’s dignity as a being who offers and demands justifications.” The person who lacks certain goods should not be regarded as the primary victim of injustice but instead the one who does not ‘count’ when it comes to deciding about the process of producing and allocating of goods.

4. One can cut different paths through contemporary discussions of justice. However, the one opened up by the question of the two pictures of justice is especially instructive, for from this perspective certain conventional adversaries unexpectedly find themselves in the same boat. An example is provided by the recent debate concerning equality. By this is actually meant two points of discussion: on the one hand, the question ‘Equality of what? - of resources, welfare or capabilities” - and,

A

I explain this more fully in Forst, The Right to Justification.

On this, see Pitkin’s critique of Plato’s apolitical notion of justice in Wittgenstein and Justice, p. 306: ‘A distribution imposed by fiat from above, on creatures with no claim of their own, programmed to accept as their own what the system assigns, cannot really illustrate the problems of justice but only avoid them?

On the notion of dignity, see R. Forst, Justification and Critique: Towards a Critical Theory of Politics. Cambridge: Polity, 2013b, ch. 4.

V See, especially, G. A. Cohen, ‘Equality of What?: On Welfare, Goods, and Capabilities, in M. Nussbaum, and A. Sen (eds), The Quality of Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993, pp. 9-29; R. Dworkin, Sovereign Virtue: The Theory and Practice of Equality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000, part I; H. Brighouse and I. Robeyns (eds), Measuring Justice: Primary Goods and Capabilities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

a on the other, the question ‘Why equality at all?. From the perspective of the difference between the two pictures of justice, however, it becomes apparent that both the advocates and the opponents of equality frequently operate with the same understanding, and this often finds expression in a specific image, that of the mother who has to divide up a cake and asks herself how this should be done.'* Egalitarians argue for the primacy of the equal distribution of goods, according to which other arguments for legitimate unequal distributions - for instance, ones based on need, merit or prior claims - then have to be treated as special reasons. Alternatively, an egalitarian calculus of need satisfaction - a measure of welfare — is posited which serves as the goal of distribution.’ However, in the process the questions of how the cake was produced and, even more importantly, of who gets to play the role of the mother, remain largely unthematized. Yet that is the primary question of justice. Attempts are made to answer it in terms of the distribution of a ‘good’ of ‘power.” But no such ‘good’ exists as something to be distributed; on the contrary, power comes about in a different way - namely, through processes of recognition without a prior distributive authority.”

5. Analogous problems are encountered on the side of the critics of equality. In Harry Frankfurt’s view, for example, the defenders of egalitarian conceptions of justice cannot be concerned with the value of

See, for example, E. Tugendhat, Vorlesungen über Ethik. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1993, pp. 373f; W. Hinsch, Gerechtfertigte Ungleichheiten. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2002, pp. 169f. S. Gosepath, Gleiche Gerechtigkeit. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2004, pp. 250ff. The cake example, though without the mother, can also be found in I. Berlin, ‘Equality, in ibid., Concepts and Categories. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981, p. 84. See also Rawls in A Theory of Justice, p. 74.

For a paradigmatic expression, see R. Arneson, ‘Luck and Equality, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, supp. vol., (2001), 73-90; and ‘Luck Egalitarianism: An Interpretation and Defense’ Philosophical Topics 32(1/2), (2004), 1-20.

Tugendhat, Vorlesungen, p. 379; Gosepath, Gleiche Gerechtigkeit, p. 90.

Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference; J. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, trans. by W. Rehg. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996a. On the importance of the issue of power for questions of justice, see also I. Shapiro, Democratic Justice. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999. The fact that no general ‘good’ of power exists does not mean that the resources necessary to generate power cannot be the object of distributions. I try to show that power should be situated in the space of justifications in ‘Noumenal Power’ (Normative Orders Working Paper 2/2013d.).

equality at all; for if you ask them what is so bad about inequality, they respond by pointing to the negative consequences of life in a society of inequality, in particular to the fact that certain people lack goods which are important for living a satisfactory life.” What is bad about such a life is supposed to be that the people in question lack essential goods, not that others are better off.”

So-called ‘sufficientarians™* have taken up these arguments and argue that ‘at least the especially important, elementary standards of justice are of a nonrelational kind,” and that justice is concerned with creating ‘conditions of life befitting human beings’ that can be measured according to ‘absolute standards of fulfilment, not according to what others have. On this view, a universal conception of the goods ‘necessary for a good life’ should be produced with reference to particular lists of basic goods or capabilities.

These approaches are also vulnerable to serious objections. For Frankfurt’s assertion that the pivotal issue is not how much others have but only whether I have ‘enough’ is valid only when conditions of background justice pertain, that is, only when others have not previously taken advantage of me. Otherwise it could not be reconciled with my dignity as a being who is in principle worthy of equal moral respect (a standard that Frankfurt emphasizes). Hence we must look for reasons for such background justice elsewhere.

But, in addition, the idea of ‘having enough’ or ‘getting enough does not get at the essence of justice, that is, the prevention of social domination. Justice is always a ‘relational’ matter; it does not first inquire into subjective or objective states of affairs but into relations between human beings and what they owe to each other given these relations. In particular, we do not explain the requirements of justice on the model of morally required aid in specific situations of want or need; instead 2 H. Frankfurt, ‘Equality as a Moral Ideal; in ibid., The Importance of What We Care About. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988, pp. 143-58; and ‘Equality and Respect; in ibid., Necessity, Volition, and Love. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, pp. 146-54.

2 Thus also J. Raz, The Morality of Freedom. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986, ch. 9.

2% R. Crisp, ‘Equality, Priority, and Compassion, Ethics 113(4), (2003), 745-63.

5 A. Krebs, Einleitung: Die neue Egalitarismuskritik im Überblick, in ibid. (ed.), Gleichheit oder Gerechtigkeit. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000, pp. 17f.

they come into play in situations where what is at stake are relations between human beings that are fundamentally in need of justification, where those involved are connected by political relations of rule or by social relations of cooperation in the production and distribution of goods - or, as is often the case, by relations of ‘negative cooperation, of coercion or domination (whether by legal, economic or political means). It makes a huge difference whether someone is deprived of certain goods and opportunities unjustly and without justification or whether he or she lacks certain goods for whatever reason (e.g. as a result of a natural catastrophe, as mentioned above). By losing sight of the former context, one misses or conceals the problem of justice as well as that of injustice. Justice requires that those involved in a context of (positive or negative) cooperation should be respected as equals. That means that they should enjoy equal rights to take part in the social and political order of justification in which the conditions under which goods are produced and distributed are determined. The statemandated assignment of goods in accordance with ‘absolute’ standards that abstract from the real context of justice or injustice is far from doing justice to the ‘dignity’ of the individual who seeks justice.

6. But what exactly is supposed to be wrong with taking a sufficiently nuanced theory of basic capabilities as the basis for a theory of justice that would put an end to discussions concerning basic goods, resources, welfare, etc.? Isn’t justice after all concerned with the satisfaction of the basic claim to be able to live an autonomous good life? Isnt a theory that disregards the results of distribution blind, indeed blinder than any depiction of Justitia? Martha Nussbaum argues thus in her study Frontiers of Justice against Rawls and for a ‘minimal level of justice’ in accordance with a list of basic capabilities and faculties that must be secured.” A results-oriented view of justice knows the correct outcome and then looks for the necessary procedure leading to it in the best way possible (in Rawls’s terms, ‘imperfect procedural justice). The

% M. Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006, p. 74. 27 Rawls, A Theory of Justice, pp. 74f.