Mareeva S.V. Towards Greater Equality and Justice. In: Life Expectations of the People. Research Series on the Chinese Dream and China’s Development Path. ...

Abstract

Justice is often defined as the attainment of what is fair and right. It is also often related to the concept of equality, in which everyone gets due reward in accordance with what they deserve. Social justice has been a key issue in social philosophy since antiquity. Aristotle defines two particular forms of justice: rectificatory and distributive. Rectificatory justice implies the principal “equals should get equal.” Distributive justice employs geometric proportions: what each person receives is proportional to his merit. During the Enlightenment, a new, liberal justice theory developed that was based on the premise that justice can be attained through the application of law. This new theory also involved the ideas of social contract, freedom from government intervention, and the priority of personal rights (T. Hobbes, J. Locke, J.-J. Rousseau, C.-L. Montesquieu). The concept was re-framed in the twentieth century by J. Rawles. His theory of justice is based on two main principles: first, each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with a similar liberty for others; second, social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they offer the greatest benefit to the least-advantaged members of society, and offices and positions must be open to everyone under conditions of fair and equal opportunity. According to Rawles, both a democratic government with a dominant private sector and market economy and authoritarian regime with the prevalence of state property can achieve the two principles. He gives preference to social justice over economic efficiency. However, even though Rawles’ theory is based on the priority of rights and freedoms, it has often been criticized by liberal philosophers (by M. Friedman and F. Hayek in particular).

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