Applying Theories of Justice to the Real World

Theories of justice in political philosophy often experience a rupture between their intellectual formulation and their practice in reality. To elaborate on how this rupture can be surpassed, whether within a local community or across nations, The Caravel conducted an interview with Professor Thad Williamson at the University of Richmond. 

Dr. Williamson is a Professor of Leadership Studies and Philosophy, Politics, Economics and Law at Richmond’s Jepson School of Leadership Studies. In this discussion, he expresses themes of civic equality, humility, democracy, and global transition, drawing insight from a series of texts of various historical backgrounds. His explanations of intentional justice, community wealth building, and participatory budgeting offer Georgetown students a valuable lesson of how to actionably implement justice in today’s political and social setting.

Interviewer: Your book review of Danielle Allen’s Justice by Means of Democracy evaluates how author Danielle Allen attempts to apply abstract theories of justice to the real world. To what degree do you believe Allen succeeds in this ambitious goal and where do you believe she falls short?

Williamson: Justice by Means of Democracy is a fresh reset on conversations about John Rawls’ seminal book A Theory of Justice in 1971. A Theory of Justice was a book of its time, even though its very title had a universalistic theme. There is a sense that Rawls’ powerful train of thought has run its course and that we now need to more explicitly bring in questions of race, gender, and identity. Rawls’ theory was aware of these questions but not fully adequate for dealing with them. 

The world also went very differently than where Rawls hoped it would. In later writings from the 1990s, Rawls revisited the main ideas of A Theory of Justice and expressed deep disappointment about America. In the 1970s, he said (or implied) that in the United States at least we have a consensus on certain core values of civic equality and equality of opportunity. Rawls cast his project as working out philosophically the implications of our actual shared beliefs and thought that would be sufficient to gird a consensus of fairly robust principles of justice that could provide an anchor to guide common reform efforts. But the United States and the world have gone a completely different way, particularly with respect to economic inequality. 

Professor Allen's aim is to reset the conversation with the fundamental idea that our sense of justice is always closely connected to political equality: the ability to come together as civic equals, where no one has a position to dominate one another or be dominated despite many lines of difference. I think she's quite successful in this. I say that as someone who myself has worked in the Rawlsian paradigm quite a bit, although part of me wishes she had gauged aspects of that literature a bit more. I was a co-editor (with Martin O’Neill) of Property-Owning Democracy: Rawls and Beyond where we called attention to the forgotten fact that Rawls was not a welfare state liberal and was in fact more radical. He wanted a political economy based on a deeper sense of equity.

So if I had one mild criticism, I wish Allen was a little tougher on modern-day plutocracy. In Rawls’ later writings, there's a fair amount of clarity that no form of capitalism can fulfill the principles of justice. The judgment was that welfare-state capitalism just won't cut it in the end. I don’t see a conclusion along those lines quite so clearly in Allen’s book, and I think that including engaging that cutting-edge strand of Rawlsian literature could have made her very strong book even stronger. Nonetheless, I think the book is extremely successful overall, extremely important, and extremely useful to students. 

Interviewer: Where in your own work have you engaged with the dialectical relationship between theories of justice and action that implement them? How do its dimensions shift within a singular polity such as the city of Richmond or the United States, as opposed to questions of global justice?

Williamson: I have engaged with a lot of local political and civic activity. I worked with elected officials and within city government, including the two most recent Richmond mayors. My first responsibility when I engage in local civic work is to learn and listen by acknowledging the expertise and experience of others. I then contribute to the conversation where needed, whether by contributing data, factual bases for conversation, or showing how ideas or issues in tension with one another might be resolved. 

When you get out there in the real world, and if you use any of the civic virtues pulled from Alexis de Tocqueville or Danielle Allen, you're going to learn humility. I think that commitment to listening is the kind of democratic practice that Daniel Allen talks about. Sometimes you have to talk without there being a solution and take the time to build trust before we can even begin to resolve the issue at hand. 

In a broad sense, some basic philosophical ideas are useful and I have invoked them from time to time. For example, in meetings, I might say things like, “Can we all agree that, no matter what happens, we're going to make sure that no one living in public housing in Richmond will be made worse off by any policy action we enact?” 

In Richmond, we have a profound legacy of racial injustice, but the flip side is that there's always been a robust Black resistance to it. There's a language about justice that is regularly part of the public conversation here. I don't use the word “justice” lightly at all in Richmond because people around here know what it means to be excluded and to be separate and unequal. 

All of my work in Richmond asks how you build a shared idea or policy paradigm that everybody in the community can relate to. We termed it “community wealth building,” which an organization called the Democracy Collaborative coined almost twenty years ago. I brought that idea to the mayoral anti-poverty initiative, but then I also learned that someone independently in the community, a Black-led organization, was using the exact same term based on their lived experience in their particular community. To use a Rawlsian term, that convergence reflects an “equilibrium” between ideas and practice that sometimes emerges when you try to build the widest coalition for change that you can. 

Global justice is a conversation at an entirely different level. As a younger person, I was very struck by how absurd the differences between the United States and a lot of the rest of the world are. At a certain point, I reached the conclusion that the best gift that American citizens can give the rest of the world is to fix ourselves. Maybe the United States could have less military adventurism, imperialism, or fossil fuel burning. 

Unless you’re willing to directly acknowledge that the United States is the world's military superpower, and at least raise the question of whether we will forever be organized as an empire, it’s hard to have a truly serious conversation about global justice. Certainly within the current framework we could have improved international collaboration and problem-solving that could be critically important in addressing things like climate change, but actual global justice would require a deeper re-imagining of not only the global system but the fundamentals of our own society as well. 

Interviewer: Are there any ideas of thought or social movements from outside the United States that particularly inspired how you approach the problems of democracy and injustice you face in Richmond?

Williamson: One movement I’m not personally involved in but that I support is participatory budgeting. This originated in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and the city of Richmond is running its first participatory budgeting pilot with actual money for the capital budget. A friend of mine led that effort from the outside, in collaboration with the city council and the administration, and now he's on the inside of city hall leading it. Participatory budgeting gives a template to connect people closer to the government. Archon Fung, at Harvard’s Kennedy School, writes about the need for a governance alternative to bureaucracy and the market. People on the left criticize markets and their shortcomings a lot, but arbitrary bureaucracy isn't so great either. 

I think anything that can give people a meaningful say in how their resources are used is good. It can also be a window into larger conversations about the condition of the city—how do we and how should we allocate resources, especially as a city with a 20 percent poverty rate and really low graduation rates compared to the rest of our state? Participatory budgeting can help develop better-informed citizens with a better sense of not only what’s going on, not just in their backyard, but in the city as a whole. The process involves both voice and listening. 

The fact that Richmond is piloting this process is one of the things that gives me hope. Perhaps part of healing ourselves is actually learning to listen more to the rest of the room. That goes both for people in Richmond, and for the relationship between the United States and the rest of the world. 

This interview has been edited slightly for grammar and clarity.