The Utopian

Yascha Mounk in conversation with Harvey C. Mansfield, William R. Kenan Jr. Professor for Goverment at Harvard University, and a recipient of the US National Humanities Award.

Does justice consist in just institutions?

Nowadays, we tend to think of it that way. For us, justice consists, for example, in the separation of powers or an independent judiciary because they keep our liberty secure and our policies moderate. And we think that justice also consists in just policies — for example, in the redistribution of income to make us more equal.

But, following Aristotle, I would raise a question about justice as a virtue. Justice as a virtue is different because even if there are just institutions, there might not be a just result. Just institutions have to do with process, or due process, and sometimes that process doesn’t work out justly — such as when a criminal escapes punishment through a technicality in the law or the legal process. That’s the kind of thing conservatives complain about.

Or consider just policies. You could have a redistribution of income to make it perfect from the standpoint of just policy, but you might still not have justice as a virtue because the poor take out of envy and the rich give with resentment. Neither of them feel just, or are just.

Aristotle says that justice requires not only a just action but also a just motive. A just action isn’t just doing something. It is thinking the right way. If you have a country that has a just distribution of income but in which nobody is just — where everybody has these contrary passions which really in themselves are unjust — then you wouldn’t have justice. So that’s one thing I would say about justice today.

That sounds like justice should perfect us. But shouldn’t justice, first of all, make sure that everybody in society gets a fair shake?

Yes, my conception of justice is perfectionist. To make sure that everybody in society get a fair shake… what that would mean is that a society becomes more just, that the citizens in it are imbued with a sense of justice. That’s the only safe way that everybody gets a fair shake.

Suppose you redistributed income and both parties continued to be animated by unjust passions — they could easily move away from that seemingly just policy. The poor would seek to take too much from the rich, and the rich would seek to grab back from the poor.

In practice, it’s not as bad as that. In America, anyway, we have a strong middle class which is probably neither envious nor resentful. There are people on both sides of the question who act in good faith. Recently, there’s been a trend towards rich people voting for the Democrats — they’re not resentful of the poor. On the other hand, Conservatives, too, act out of principle — they don’t think government should be too big or too invasive. Why not give it to them that these are reasonable and decent positions, too?

So the picture I painted at the beginning is too sharply contrasted. Still, the difficulty remains that our focus is too much on policies and institutions, and not enough on how people are.

So the justice of political institutions is important, but insufficient…

Yes, because political justice can produce people who are unjust in spirit and in motive. You have to consider this other sense of justice. You could even say that the purpose of just political institutions is to make the people just.

What good is it to give more money to the poor if you leave them with the same attachment to material goods, or the same acquisitive spirit, as the rich have? In that way, you are making them worse, in a way. Materially improved, but not in virtue.

Liberals would say that the purpose of justice is to make just political institutions, and that just political institutions should leave a private sphere in which it is not the concern of politics whether people are just. Do you reject the existence of such a private sphere?

No, I think that it can be part of public justice to have a private sphere. That is the way I would combine liberalism and Aristotle. The justice you legislate is designed to give scope to virtue in the private sphere. What measures are taken do not have to be compulsory. They can be encouraging.

Would you agree with feminists, then, that the private is political?

(Laughs.) Not in the way they want to say it. But yes, the private has political consequences.

Good consequences, however, won’t follow unless the private is respected. That’s where I would disagree with the feminists. There might be ways in which you would want to refrain from interfering in the private lives of men and women.

What would be just between men and women, or husbands and wives?

Aristotle would take us back to the question of which regime we are in. One can’t give a universal answer. We need to ask what fits our political circumstances. Who rules in this country? The answer is: we all do. It’s a democracy. In our democracy, then, relations between men and women have to be democratic. So we want some kind of an equality between men and women.

Now, feminists want an equality of sameness, in which the sexes are very similar, or the same — in which being of one sex or another has as little as possible consequence for your role or your work or your duties. That seems unreasonable to me.

You could still have a kind of equality of equal spheres or equal respect. The home life of a woman is at least of equal dignity to the outdoors life or the business life of a man. To demand that women be equal — or have the same results as well as opportunities — is demeaning to the importance of home life.

This was perhaps better understood under what’s called patriarchy than it is today. After all, the main thrust of feminism is not against men. It’s against femininity. It’s against the way in which feminists believe that men have forced women to be. So I think you can have equality with different roles.

You argue that there is no “sameness” between men and women. So what are the main differences between men and women — and are they naturally or socially founded?

Both. Any natural difference is always accompanied by a social difference. It’s very hard to isolate what’s natural. It’s actually wrong for social science to try to do this. Social science always thinks of what is natural and what is social as opposed to each other. It is better to say that the natural and the social cooperate.

It is indisputable that women naturally have a maternal instinct. That’s indisputable, but it takes many different forms because different societies interpret it differently.

So that’s a natural inclination that can be suppressed, or it can be absent — because some women are exceptions to what’s true of most women — or it can be shaped in one way or another by our conventions. Today we have replaced the convention of patriarchy with the conventions of gender neutrality. That’s just a new set of conventions. It’s not any more natural than what we used to do.

But then what we used to do was not any more natural either. So how do we reason…

Different conventions can be closer to natural than others. A couple of generations ago in this country there was a better concordance with nature and with what is natural between men and women. These conventions did reflect a similarity between the two sexes — there is a similarity, obviously. But it also recognized the differences.

So nature is our guide as to what is just?

Yes, though the trouble is that nature never exists purely. It always has different overall interpretations. Our overall interpretation is democratic. That’s how we understand justice.

Different places will understand justice differently. That’s why Aristotle says that justice is changeable. Even though it’s natural, it’s not the same everywhere and at every time.

Now you are in danger of sounding relativist…

I know I am. I am. That’s right.

What you would have to do to escape being relativist is to look at the best regime and see what conventions are inescapable from nature. That’s what Plato does. It raises the question of how much justice you want. How much justice is good? You can say justice is good, but is there any limitation on justice?

Plato shows that we don’t want complete or total justice — justice carried to the full extent of its logic. For example we do want to have private families. We want a situation where a husband and wife can prefer their own children to other people’s children, even though that is unjust — truly unjust, you cannot deny that. Complete justice leads to a bad result.

Do you have an example of somebody who wants too much justice?

Barack Obama. Yes, perhaps the trouble with Obama is that he wants too much justice.

What do you see as the greatest injustices in the United States today?

They are not economic, I don’t think. There are indecent salaries for certain people. Bankers on Wall Street or high corporate executives who aren’t really entrepreneurs and don’t deserve to be rewarded as if they were. They didn’t have their own idea and develop their own business like Bill Gates. Though you could even say that it’s unjust that Bill Gates has that much money — and probably not good for him.

We ought to be thinking of that a little more. Is it good for a person who makes a lot of money to make that much money? And the same with the poor: is it good for them to make more, or to get more without their effort?

So there are outstanding, huge, stark inequalities. But I think it would probably be worse to take them away than to leave them as they are.

What about the bottom end of economic inequality? For example, in a just society, should every citizen have access to health care?

Access, for sure — which we have right now. If you’re destitute you still get health care. It’s just not regularly provided for by a government guarantee. Now, some people don’t have health insurance because they don’t pay attention to their needs, or claim what they could claim. Others go to hospital emergency rooms for everyday medical troubles they have. That’s a somewhat slapdash system we have for the people at the bottom.

We might disagree about whether every citizen currently has access to health care. But that question apart, you agree that in a just society every citizen should have actual access to health care?

Yes. As long as you understand that your body is not the most important thing. Neither your body nor your health is as important as your virtue…

What do you see as the greatest injustices in the wider world today?

They are mostly political. I think that those countries that have political justice — now we go back to just institutions — are much better off than others, even economically. If Africa had more honest, decent and dependable democratic institutions, it would be much better off. There would be fewer destitute people and those who are poor would be much more hopeful.

So in the US we don’t need more equality. But in the wider world we need more equality?

Yes. Though I am only presenting politics as a way to get to that — I do not think it is the most important thing. Political freedom is more important than economic equality. But political freedom does, as a byproduct, also improve economic equality.

Yascha Mounk, co-founder of The Utopian, is a political theorist.