II. Uncoupling Justice from the Need for Social Rules

It will be helpful to distinguish what I will call social rules from social conventions as follows, limiting ourselves to ones that serve to adjudicate conflicts between individuals. A social rule of adjudication not only specifies resolutions of conflicts but is also accompanied by social or official sanctions for noncompliance with the standard. We can regard a convention of adjudication as the case where such a standard is conformed to in practice, even without any threat or mechanism of punishment for noncompliance, but still conditionally on most others complying as well. We will distinguish both of those from the case in which the standard is complied with, but owing neither to any social rule nor to any convention as I have defined these, but owing entirely to individuals having or adopting these standards in their own motives. ^{Footnote 9} I will call these — rules, conventions, and motives — the three mechanisms by which the behavioral need (about which more shortly) might be met.

Hume famously says, “if men pursu’d the publick interest naturally, and with a hearty affection, they wou’d never have dream’d of restraining each other by these rules” ^{Footnote 10} This Humean point will eventually suit my purposes nicely, but first notice how it is grist for the mill of the critic of idealistically high standards of justice. Hume is arguing that the very idea of justice is owed, causally speaking, to real conditions of human life which, being far from ideal in certain ways, gave rise to a human need for and development of social rules of adjudication. For my purposes we can allow that Hume is right about this. The lesson many seem to have drawn is that whatever the standard of justice might require, it is, for this Humean reason, inseparable from — has no application outside of — those unfortunate conditions that explain its emergence in rules. The problem to which such rules provide a solution sets the conditions for the very applicability of the standard of justice. This is one of the things I propose to challenge. The conditions necessary for the emergence of mechanisms of justice are not (at least not necessarily) conditions necessary for the applicability of justice. This will allow us to see at least one highly idealistic scenario that is not justice-inapt even though no rules are necessary there, namely a condition of widespread moral motives of justice.

We should consider first whether justice only applies when there is a human need for social rules of adjudication. In a first stage of argument, I will argue that this is not so, since those needs might be met by conventions or by motives embodying similar standards. That is a first important result, but it would not yet challenge the suggestion that justice applies only when there is a human need for one or another of the adjudicatory mechanisms, even if only internalized motives of justice. I turn later to questioning the broad strategy of linking justice to a human need. (See the section on “Who Needs Justice?”)

The suggestion to be scrutinized first is that the applicability of a standard of justice depends on the presence of conditions where there is a practical need for social rules embodying such a standard. This suggestion, which I will criticize, makes use of the following two ideas:

In order to have all three in once place, I introduce a third class of conditions here and come back to it later:

The need for social rules (the rule-need) is derivative, we must assume, from a need for a certain organization of behavior (which I will refer to as the behavioral need). In particular, the rules would serve to bring about behavior that is more peaceful and productive, largely by avoiding uncertainty and battle. The details should not matter. We are to consider circumstances in which a collection of socially interacting people stands to benefit greatly from behavior that is organized in the right way. We are to suppose further that behavior would never come to be suitably organized if not for the emergence of some social rules for adjudicating disputes and conflicts. In that derivative way, the people have a great need for such social rules, in order to meet the need for such behavior.

To say that the behavior, and derivatively the rules, are “needed” is plainly to claim that it would be in people’s interest. We might wonder, which people’s interest? I want to flag this issue and return to it (see section on “Who needs justice?”), but we can proceed for now on the simple assumption that to say that the behavior and rules are needed in the relevant sense is to say that having them would be to everyone’s mutual advantage, adding, if you like, that the relevant interests that are mutually served are dire or urgent ones as opposed to refinements of the good life.

There are ways in which the needed organization of behavior could, in principle, be produced without social rules, and we will consider two such ways. If it were possible to arrive at a social convention in which the needed organization of behavior was present, each individual’s behavior being conditional on the expectation of the others’, but without threats of sanction, no social rules would be needed — rules being defined for our purposes as including sanctions. Maybe they were needed in the past as a precursor, or maybe not, but either way, they are not needed once there is such a convention. Maybe rules are needed because no such convention will, in fact, arise, but what is needed is either rules, or a convention, or some way of producing the behavior.

All sides agree that justice has application in the case where the organized behavior is needed and social rules are present. The question, as I have said, is whether that is the only case in which it applies. But once we consider the case of a convention, there is evidently as much application of the idea of justice there as in the case of enforced rules. The content of the mechanism, namely the standard, is, we can suppose, unchanged, and the need they are serving is also precisely the same: the suitable organization of behavior along the conflict-resolving lines we described. So, as a first step, in the specific sanction-entailing sense of “rules,” there is a condition in which the standard of justice applies even though there is no need for social rules: when there is the behavioral need plus a convention.

By distinguishing, in that way, the standard from the particular mechanism of social rules, it is easy to see that there is also a second way in which the behavioral need could in principle be met without the presence of social rules. Imagine, in a Humean spirit if you like, some long peaceful period of life under such conventions of justice. It is conceivable that people will become attached to the motive of compliance with these norms, praising it in others and taking pride in their own. (We might even regard them as becoming, in that Humean way, moral motives.) Predictions are not what matter here; just suppose this happens. Alternatively, and more generally, suppose that people come (maybe by this convention-induced mechanism, or some other functional explanation, or in some entirely different way) to be motivated to behave in just the same way as under that convention, except now the motive to comply with that same standard is not contingent on its being conventional to do so. Suppose the motive to so act has its force for each agent regardless of whether others are expected to behave similarly, though suppose they all do. The norms are now, as we might say, internalized. For simplicity, call these coordinate motives of justice in the case where there are no social rules or conventions of justice, even if there might have been in the past. ^{Footnote 11} Coordinate motives of justice would meet the need for suitably organized behavior, since the behavior produced by the rules and conventions is the very same behavior (modulo the motives) that is produced by these coordinate motives. So we see that there could be conditions where neither rules nor conventions are needed, because there are coordinate motives to meet the behavioral need. ^{Footnote 12}

If the standard of justice, having been granted to have application where no rules or conventions of adjudication were needed, applies here too, then we will have decoupled the conditions of applicability from the conditions in which rules or conventions of adjudication are needed. And, indeed, I see no way it could be denied even on the broadly Humean approach. Even if the standard of justice gets its content in a certain way from the standards embodied in the mechanisms of adjudication that arise from certain human needs, internalized motives of adjudication are one such mechanism. Justice, then, could apply even in conditions where there is no need for social rules or conventions because there is the alternative mechanism of just people. Not only does this let justice apply independently of the need for rules, it applies in what anyone would recognize as a highly idealistic, and maybe very unlikely condition — the condition in which motives of justice are sufficient to produce the needed behavior, even with social rules or conventions (as defined).

The idea that such a mechanism might arise, but only at a later historical period than the mechanisms of rules and conventions is important in Marx, as when he contrasts merely “political emancipation” with the “human emancipation” in which the “real, individual man resumes the abstract citizen into himself,” a social function previously farmed out to political institutions in which one is seen as merely a juridical person. Marx and others sympathetic to this picture might conceive of that achievement as beyond politics, law, and the state. I will argue only that it is not beyond justice. The late stages of Marxian theory, if I am right, fall under the general theory of justice as a domain of inquiry, not outside it.

As we saw earlier, Hume says, “if men pursu’d the publick interest naturally, and with a hearty affection, they wou’d never have dream’d of restraining each other by these rules” ^{Footnote 13} This passage, which is followed by many other authors, is double edged. On one edge, it says that if people’s interests, understanding, and motives were never competing or conflicting in any way in the first place we would have no need for behavior to be organized by standards of justice, and (what is different) justice would fail to apply. I grant that. But on the other edge it also, inadvertently I suppose, shows us that sometimes where justice does apply, because something in people’s conditions puts them at odds, there might still be no need for social rules of adjudication (by which people “restrain each other,” as Hume says), or even conventions, and this is because there might be internalized standards of justice by which men pursue “the publick interest” if not “naturally,” then still “with a hearty affection.” Hume says that there would be no need for restraint by rules in that case. Whether or not we can find it in Hume, a further point is that, while there would be no need in that case for sanction-backed social rules, the hearty affection for the public good would itself be a needed, and happily present, mechanism of what Hart calls “mutual forbearance.” The public interest is, presumably, some appropriate arrangement that, among other things, resolves conflicts and disputes of aims and beliefs. Those conflicts do not disappear just because all parties are motivated to deal with them in some specified way, and so justice plainly applies. The motive of justice will have (perhaps inherited from rules) content that coordinates behavior in order to adjudicate the admitted conflicts among people’s other interests. The point is that justice cannot be denied application in that fortuitous case, since it is just a third mechanism, embodying the same standard as might be embodied by rules or conventions, which tends to meet the need for certain kinds of organized behavior. Of course, justice, like any standard, has application only in certain conditions, as I have mentioned. If people had no attitudes that put them at odds in the first place — no self-favoring desires or headstrong beliefs that rules or conventions or motives of justice might restrain — then justice would not even apply. But those conditions of application are compatible with a highly idealistic world of people who have no need for rules or conventions of justice, because they are just in their coordinate motives.

Government, roughly the promulgation and coercive enforcement of laws, is obviously one salient form that social rules, in my sense, might take. So, if the presence of convention or coordinate motives of justice can meet the behavioral need, government would not be needed to serve that role. There is a traditional interest in the question whether morally perfect people would still need government, to which I return below. ^{Footnote 14} For now, notice that no position is taken on that question by noting that there is a conceivable arrangement of motives that would make government unnecessary. I will argue below that moral perfection does not ensure such an arrangement, in which case government might yet be necessary.

III. Multiple Realizability and Specification

Prior to any mechanism, there might be no particular behaviors that count as unjust, since there are multiple, and indeed infinitely many, coordinate patterns of behavior any of which would be eligible as a pattern that specifies the content of justice. We might call patterns of which this is true eligible patterns. We sometimes say that it is arbitrary which specification is adopted. Certainly, when considering the enormous number and complexity of rules of property in a modern state, it is probable that there would be lots of alternative patterns that would be just. If some particular change would plausibly make a certain arrangement less just, it will often be possible to devise a second change elsewhere in the system that countervails the first from the standpoint of justice. And that procedure could probably be repeated a large number of times, generating a new just system with each iteration. If so, there might be a wide variety of systems of, say, property that are equally eligible from the standpoint of justice — equally suited to specify which behaviors count as just and unjust. We can speak, then, of the multiple realizability of justice, and also of a pre-specification phase in the development of just arrangements. It is important not to exaggerate the multiplicity. Not just any pattern would count as a specification of justice. (Consider, for example, the initial changes to a just system but without the countervailing changes just discussed.) Still, there is multiplicity and it is in some ways vast.

If none of the eligible patterns has been selected by the emergence of eligible social rules or other mechanisms, does nothing count as just or unjust? We should allow for the possibility that some acts would be forbidden by each and every member of the set of eligible patterns. ^{Footnote 15} Whatever is in that overlapping set is the portion of the content of justice that is, as I will call it “naturally determinate.” Still, there is bound to be much that is not common in that way. We can grant for the sake of argument that social rules or conventions of justice are necessary in order to give fuller specification to justice, selecting among morally eligible patterns.

An arrangement that is selected by the rules at one time can remain selected whether the rules themselves persist or not. Think of a law that selects left-side driving. If convention or even internalized motives come to conform to that standard, left-side driving might remain selected even if the law were to expire or be repealed. The same point applies to social rules or conventions of adjudication. They do not need to persist in order for their power of selection to persist. Similarly, once some mechanism has done the specifying, then not even a mechanism of internalized motives is required in order for justice of behavior to be specified. Imagine such motives weakening over time. At least for some period this will count as a falling into injustice. The standard of behavior applies whether any mechanism is in place or not, even if some mechanism must previously have been in place to accomplish the specification. The behavioral standard’s applicability is not ultimately owing to any positive rule or norm or practice’s being currently in place or being needed. Plausibly, if all mechanisms have lapsed for too long, the specification lapses as well and there is a new need for one or another mechanism of justice. There might still be some requirements of justice if, as seems likely, there is some overlapping content of all eligible mechanisms, the naturally determinate portion of the standard of justice.

If not just any stable order of behavior is sufficient to count compliant behavior as just, we ought to ask which patterns are justice-apt in that sense and which are not. That is a hard question, and I return to it in the next section. However, acknowledging the question is enough to suggest the unavoidability of appealing to a higher-order standard by which whole systems (basic social structures?) are to be judged, so that only some are eligible as just (understood as justice-specifying) arrangements. Call this higher-order standard the standard for just arrangements. It is higher-order because it is the arrangements themselves that embody standards of just behavior.

There is the need, then, to appeal both to a standard for just arrangements — those that would, by specification from the eligible candidates, render certain behaviors just and unjust — as well as standards of justice that are specified by the emergence of one of the eligible arrangements. The higher-order standard’s status cannot coherently itself be a matter of artifice or invention, even if the specification of some particular arrangement is. Rather, it ranges over possibilities of human artifice — the mechanisms of adjudication that could conceivably be devised — and counts some of them as mechanisms of justice, other ones not.

One might hope to avoid appealing to any such standard of just arrangements (perhaps if one is hoping to stay broadly conventionalist about all standards of justice) simply by appeal to the question of which arrangements have any chance of actually emerging. Suppose only arrangements that would benefit everyone would tend to emerge. That would select some arrangements out of the set of all conceivable possibilities. And mutual advantage has a promising ring to it. I turn in the next section to criticizing this familiar approach.

Conflict or disagreement alone may not themselves be enough to count any behaviors as unjust prior to the selection of any of the eligible arrangements of adjudication; standards of justice of behavior would not apply. But either conflict or disagreement is enough to give meaning to the possibility of a system of adjudication, and prior to the emergence of any such system, some of the possible systems are disqualified by a higher-order standard of justice. Those conditions are ones in which, as Rawls says, “questions of justice arise.” ^{Footnote 16} The standard of justice is doing some work already. We might express it this way: the conditions of the applicability of justice come in two kinds: a) conditions in which non-artificial standards of justice-eligible arrangements apply, categorizing some possible arrangements as systems of adjudication that would successfully specify which behaviors are just, and b) conditions in which one of the eligible arrangements has been somehow selected in practice, and so now certain behaviors are just and others unjust (or ones that were not already naturally determinate). And, not to be forgotten: the specification might well persist, even if all mechanisms come to disappear, leaving certain behaviors to count as just or unjust even there. ^{Footnote 17}

Since, to some extent, the content of justice gets specified by whichever mechanism arises, it might seem as though there is no independent basis upon which someone might criticize prevailing mechanisms. But it is always open to people to question whether the mechanism that has arisen is truly in the eligible set of arrangements — arrangements that, should they arise, not only specify resolutions, but also count as genuine norms of justice. That is a substantive moral question, not a sociological one.

Finally, it might seem that if there are no rules or conventions, then there will be no source to specify which of several competing interpretations of the norms is (already, or by fiat) correct or authoritative. There are two things to notice about this question. The first is that whatever indeterminacy there might be prior to that authoritative source, similar indeterminacy can just as well arise again in the interpretation of the source itself (a court, a written statute, or whatever). So it is not a decisive solution. Second, even if some such source is needed, that is compatible with the mechanism for meeting the behavioral need being nothing more than moral motives — that is, no sanctions, and no conditionality of the motives on similar behavior by others. So, the question of whether for some reason there needs to be such a coordination source outside of the motives themselves is not especially pertinent to our question whether justice might apply and even be satisfied even without rules or conventions.

IV. Who Needs Justice?

We noticed that there is this question: Which arrangements of adjudication are the justice-apt ones? Suppose the arrangements of behavior for purposes of adjudication that are to be counted as genuinely justice-determining are whichever ones are likely to emerge in real human social conditions, in response to a profound human need for such a thing. Central to this strategy is the suggestion that in certain conditions there comes to be a need for rules or some other mechanism of justice. What kind of need is referred to? This might mean that there are conditions in which the standard of justice applies, and that it will not be met unless there is some such mechanism. A mechanism is needed if there is to be justice. Or a mechanism might be said to be needed if there is to be justice, which is morally required. However, neither of these is the proposal I want to consider, since this is not yet to link justice to human needs in any way.

A third thing it might mean to say that there comes to be a need for some mechanism of justice is that there are certain human needs, understood as especially important and basic interests, that will only be satisfied if there is some mechanism of justice — some mechanism to specify and help produce behaviors that thereby count as just. This is saying importantly more than that mechanisms are needed if justice, which ought to obtain, is going to obtain. It now makes essential reference to fundamental human needs that would be met. On this approach, the content of justice is eventually to be understood by first understanding justice’s function, so defined, as its meeting a certain human need. I believe such a linkage between justice and human need is often thought to have the advantage of forestalling flights of fancy, keeping justice down to earth. The thought might be that mechanisms embodying high idealistic standards are patently not something humans would ever need. In any case, I want to cast doubt on the need-grounding approach in general, which would then undermine any alleged moderating pressure it is claimed to exert on the standard of justice.

When it is said that people come urgently to need some mechanism of adjudication, we ought to ask: Which people? When people are at odds, it is hardly guaranteed that everyone would benefit from the emergence of a mechanism of adjudication. Some might be better off without rules or other mechanisms of justice, retaining their advantages even while absorbing some costs of widespread dispute and conflict. They might win the battles and weather the storms.

Of course, there might be some method of adjudication that is better for all than the status quo, including the most powerful. That idea, of justice being mutually beneficial, is part of the Humean strategy that aims to show that justice is “artificial” — that is, invented by people to serve certain purposes. This is a claim about how rules of justice come about, plus a philosophical view about how the standard itself can be rooted in that functional causal history of certain social rules. The causal story invokes the idea of Pareto efficiency, and it is easy to let that suggest something normatively valuable in the causal process. That is, to give one specific such story, suppose that a method of adjudication would arise if and only if it were both a) Pareto superior (better for some, worse for none) to the status quo, and also b) Pareto superior, or at least not inferior, to each of the other Pareto improvements on the status quo. This might seem a salient possibility for the following reason: first, if people are at odds, then there will be some benefits for at least some people in having mechanisms of adjudication. However, since different methods might benefit different people, some methods might, in effect, be blocked by those with an interest in doing so. We next might notice that if any mechanism is doubly Pareto superior in that way then no one would have an interest in blocking it. For that reason, we might focus on this particular set of solutions — the mutually advantageous ones — when we ask what is likely to emerge. And then it might seem to be an auspicious side-benefit that this has led us to a normatively attractive set of cases, those that are good for everyone.

The charms of mutual advantage can be deceptive. If something is to everyone’s advantage over some alternative, then no one is in a position to complain. But the loveliness of that possibility too easily draws the spotlight away from what might be the plainer and yet still potent value of some alternatives that would not benefit everyone. The dubious claim is not that it would be great if there were a solution that is to everyone’s advantage. Rather it is the suggestion that nothing but mutual advantage is good enough. Suppose that no mechanism would emerge unless it were to everyone’s advantage over the status quo. That is no support for the idea that mutual advantage is a necessary condition of justice — that is, of an arrangement’s being an eligible candidate to specify just and unjust behaviors. Even if no other arrangements will tend to actually emerge, this is no reason to doubt that there are some that, if they were to emerge, would fully and plausibly specify which behaviors are just and which unjust. Their being justice-apt, so-categorized by the standard of just arrangements discussed above, is simply different from their being emergence-apt, so to speak.

We could, of course, yet ask whether mutual advantage happens also to be suited for this moral question. It would be a kind of coincidence if it were. But in fact it is not so suited, or so I believe. The reason, to put it perhaps a little cryptically, is that pointing out that some arrangement is not in everyone’s interest plainly has no bearing on whether it would be required by justice. ^{Footnote 18} I won’t argue for this last claim in this essay, but I do not believe that any of my other arguments depend on this verdict.

V. Does Justice Apply Only in Nonideal Conditions?

The conditions for the applicability of justice seem to include certain things in two main categories: competing interests, and conflicting judgments among people who must find a way forward together. Cases of either kind can put people at odds, and questions of a just resolution arise. ^{Footnote 19} Since a cause in either category is sufficient for questions of justice to arise, neither of them is necessary.

Conflicts of both kinds will also often be present, of course. If there were no conflicting fundamental aims or desires, there might yet be conflicts in practice owing to failures of understanding. It might be that you and I both desire that a bridge be built over the river, and yet we might disagree irreconcilably about how this can be accomplished. This could put us at odds going forward, and the question arises about a just settlement of such a conflict. The source of conflict is a cognitive limitation (broadly speaking), and not competing desires. It is sufficient, and so fundamentally competing desires are not necessary, for matters of justice to arise.

Likewise, suppose there were no cognitive limitations of the right kind to trigger questions of justice. Indeed, suppose people did not disagree about any matters of fact or doctrine. Still, if there could be competing interests and desires, the question could arise about what would be a just adjudication. Earlier (Section III) we considered whether the standard could apply even if there had not yet ever been any justice-specifying social rules or conventions. All that is needed for now is that, at least if there are or have been such specifying mechanisms, the applicability of justice can be triggered by competing interests alone, even if there were (bizarrely) no disagreements of other kinds. And vice versa.

The conditions in these two categories — competition and disagreement — are sometimes treated as if they are each necessary conditions of applicability. If that were so, then justice would only apply if conditions of both kinds were present, and so if things were, in that way, especially nonideal. I have argued that this is a mistake, but we might conjecture that there is often the following explanation for making it: it might be thought that justice ought to be defined so that it is, in some way, responsive to the normal conditions of human life. Rawls, whose treatment of these issues is at least as influential as Hume’s, famously says, “The circumstances of justice may be described as the normal conditions under which human cooperation is both possible and necessary.” ^{Footnote 20} Normal human life surely does include conditions of both kinds, and these are the conditions that, in normal life, “set the stage for questions of justice.” ^{Footnote 21} None of this, however, is any basis for concluding that either or both of them is necessary for such questions to apply. In our normal conditions, questions of justice apply not because both or any particular one of these — competition and disagreement — is the case, but because at least one or the other of them is.

If there are no conflicts of belief or aim to put people at odds, then justice does not apply. Jacob Levy argues that a theory such as Rawls’s, in which principles are selected under the hypothesis of full compliance with them, “ . . . assumes away the circumstances of justice. . . . ” This is because he believes that if there were either “limited beneficence or reasonable disagreement” then there would not be full compliance. So to assume full compliance is to assume that neither of those is present, in which case the circumstances of justice do not apply. Perhaps Levy means, specifically, reasonable disagreement about the content of justice itself. If so, however, it is not clear why we should think that such reasonable disagreement will give rise to noncompliance. But even if we waive that, other disagreements may well be present to put people at odds. Similarly, why should we think that “limited beneficence” (or, he might have in mind conflicting aims, judging from the surrounding passage) would guarantee noncompliance? Mechanisms of justice are not normally meant to dissolve conflicts of aim, but to fix what is to be done in their presence. Just because we agree to flip a coin between restaurants, for example, does not mean either of us has changed our preferences, and those preferences can remain in conflict even as we each accept the result of the coin flip and proceed to the winning venue. Conflicts of either aim or belief are sufficient for the applicability of justice, and an assumption of full-compliance, for whatever theoretical purpose it might serve, does not entail that neither kind of conflict is present.

VI. Is Moral Deficiency a Circumstance of Justice?

Suppose there were no conflicting aims and no cognitive failure. Things are sounding pretty good so far. However, there might yet be (as of course there always would be) some degree of individual moral deficiency. We know that moral deficiency is not necessary for the applicability of justice since we have seen that either competing interests or certain cognitive disagreement is sufficient.

We should not skip over this point too quickly, since I believe many have been inclined to assume that justice has no application in conditions where people are morally perfect — morally perfect, that is, in other ways, leaving the virtue of justice out of it, since the question is whether justice has any application here. ^{Footnote 22} That is a mistake, at least so long as there could be disagreement or competing interests even without moral defect. It might seem that morally flawless people would not have conflicting interests or desires, but this is very hard to believe. Consider several people, each of whom has a parent painfully and prematurely dying of a condition that can be fully cured by the one available dose of medicine. The claim in question is that there is no occasion for rules or even motives of justice so long as no one is morally deficient. But, if justice is temporarily put aside, it is hard to discern any moral deficiency merely in the profound desire of each party to save her parent’s life even at the cost of another person’s life. Since any population would find themselves confronted with many such scenarios, questions of justice would seem to arise even if no one was (in that pre-justice context) morally deficient. ^{Footnote 23} Morally excessive selfishness does seem possible there, as in a person who cares not at all for the suffering of others and only for himself, but that sort of extreme selfishness would not be necessary in order for the issue of justice to arise.

Hobbes, whose account of the need for coercively backed political authority is a clear precursor of Hume’s account of circumstances of justice, saw the need for adjudicatory mechanisms even in the absence of vice. He argues that before there are any rules with sanctions, if a contract is made, “upon any reasonable suspition, it is Voyd.” If and when there are, instead, credibly threatened sanctions, “that feare is no more reasonable.” ^{Footnote 24} Hobbes, of course, doubted that such assurance could be present without the threat of force, and we do not need to deny that psychological conjecture, which Hume plainly rejected, here. We can simply note the agreement between Hobbes and Hume that it is not essentially owing to any moral defect that the need for coercively enforced social rules emerges. Even morally perfect people might need government, or other social rules, although this depends on whether conventions or coordinate moral motives are available to meet the behavioral need instead.

It is important to distinguish two points in this context:

1. a) People who are morally perfect, apart from the question of justice, may (indeed, certainly will) yet have conflicting aims and beliefs, leading to a need for some mechanism of justice, coordinate motives being one such mechanism.

2. b) Even people who are just, as well as morally good in other ways, might not lexically prioritize justice, so there might well remain a need for coercive social rules in order to meet the behavioral need.

It might seem as though this threatens my claim that coordinate motives of justice could meet the behavioral need. But it does not. That would be a conceivable motivational solution even if it is not one entailed by moral perfection, including perfect compliance with the due demands of justice. Even morally perfect people, even if they are just according to a common specification of justice, might yet need social rules or even government. However, even though moral perfection does not guarantee it, there is a possible arrangement of moral motives in which they meet the behavioral need even without government or other sanctions.

Moral fault comes in for mention in Rawls’s treatment of circumstances of justice, but only as an aside. He points out that while moral fault can sometimes lead to deep disagreements, it is not an essential ingredient:

This normal cognitive imperfection is the source of conflict that in Rawls’s later work comes to be called “the burdens of judgment.” ^{Footnote 26} There is no reason to disagree with Rawls here: this source of conflict does not depend on any moral defects.

It is important not to misunderstand Rawls when he also writes, “In an association of saints agreeing on a common ideal, if such a community could exist, disputes about justice would not occur. Each would work selflessly for one end as determined by their common religion, and reference to this end (assuming it to be clearly defined) would settle every question of right. But a human society is characterized by the circumstances of justice.” ^{Footnote 27} Grant that justice has no application in that case. But the condition envisaged there is not that of moral perfection, but (in addition or instead) a set of agents whose overriding motives are all perfectly common and determinate. That goes beyond conditions of the applicability of justice, but there is no reason, as I have argued, to think that such a scenario is entailed by individual moral flawlessness.

Moral deficiency is not a necessary condition for the applicability of justice, but consider the view that moral deficiency belongs on the list of conditions, along with competing interests and disagreement, sufficient to trigger questions of justice. It is hard to see how moral defect itself might put people at odds independently of competing aims and interests, or of conflicting judgments and beliefs. In particular, an immoral degree of selfishness only gives rise to conflict because people’s aims differ. In normal conditions, it is true, conflicts of interest come to a head and need resolution often only because one person or the other is, morally speaking, insufficiently concerned with the interests of others. Moral defect plays an exacerbating role. But conflicts of interest would raise questions of justice whether or not they were intensified by moral defect. A parallel point applies to the fact that sometimes people’s conflicting beliefs or convictions depend on one of them being morally deficient in some way. Again, that moral point might intensify matters, but the moral defect itself does not trigger questions of justice unless it gives rise to the disagreement. Moral defect by itself is not a source of conflict but only a potential intensifier. It is not sufficient for the applicability of justice (nor, as we have seen, is it necessary).

Moreover, even if moral deficiency were a third category of individually sufficient conditions that can trigger the applicability of justice, it would not be a necessary condition, since either of the others would be sufficient. For these over-determining reasons, then, justice cannot be denied applicability to some imagined scenario on the ground that moral defect has disappeared or been assumed away. For example, whatever the interest of doing so might be, there would be no conceptual mistake in theorizing about what would be just or unjust under otherwise morally flawless conditions, or to ask whether moral flawlessness is in some way part of what justice requires, and so on. There is no reason, including no reason stemming from the idea of circumstances of justice, to think that this kind of highly idealistic condition is outside the scope of justice’s application.

VII. Justice’s Self-Limiting Reach

There is an important general point about the limits of a standard’s applicability, one that is sometimes mentioned in thinking about circumstances of justice.

It follows that the standard of justice cannot condemn as unjust the fact that people are at odds owing to conflicts of interest or opinion. As far as this point goes, it tends to favor critics of utterly unbridled idealization. However, it is no challenge to the possibility that justice has application even in what are, by anyone’s lights, highly idealistic conditions. If there are important disagreements of the right kind, then justice would have application there even if there were some perfect harmony of interests, and moral perfection all around — pretty idealistic. If, instead, there were conflicts of interests or desires, then justice would have application even if, as before, and in a highly idealistic scenario, there were not the slightest moral deficiency, and no disagreement in any judgment, belief, or conviction.