Contextualism, Universalism, and Popular Beliefs about Justice

According to contextualism about justice, the validity of principles of justice is sensitive to empirical facts. The general idea is that the existence of specific social forms in context, C1, may make a specific principle of justice P1 valid in C1. In another context, C2, where the relevant social forms are different, P1 may be invalid, et cetera. According to universalism about justice, the validity of principles of justice is insensitive to empirical facts. The general idea is that the correct principles of justice are valid regardless of which social forms happen to exist. If P1 is just in C1, it is also just in C2, et cetera. Conventionalism about justice is the view that principles of justice are nothing more than social constructs. They simply express sociological facts about what happens to count as justice among people at a specific time and place. Conventionalist principles are thus devoid of any critical potential. In contrast, on both contextualism and universalism, it is possible for people to be mistaken about what justice requires. By endorsing either, we may thus preserve the critical role that political philosophers normally ascribe to the concept of justice. Contextualism, universalism, and conventionalism are primarily views about the nature of principles of justice – about their justificatory structure – not their substantive content. A tangential discussion concerns how principles of justice should be selected or devised. According to what I shall call the ‘internalist’ view about the selection of principles, popular beliefs constrain the content of ideal justice as follows: it must be possible for people to endorse the content of the principles of justice, through reasoned discussion starting from people’s current beliefs. Popular beliefs are thus (partly) constitutive of justice. The ‘internalist’ view contrasts with what I shall call the ‘externalist’ view about the selection of principles. According to the ‘externalist’ view, popular beliefs do not constrain the content of ideal justice: it need not be possible for people to endorse the content of the principles of justice, through reasoned discussion starting from people’s current beliefs. Popular beliefs are thus not constitutive of justice. In this paper, I argue that the ‘internalist’ view (about the selection of principles) sits uneasily with contextualism about (the nature of) justice. More specifically, I argue that if contextualist principles are selected in accordance with the ‘internalist’ view, those principles risk collapsing into conventionalist principles. That, I believe, is a surprising result because it challenges the coherence of what we may call ‘internalist’ contextualism – an approach championed by prominent theorists such as David Miller and Mathias Risse. In the paper’s second part, I argue that proponents of contextualism have good reason to reject the ‘internalist’ view and instead endorse ‘externalist’ selection of principles. If they do, they may continue to steer a middle-ground – as they expressly seek to do – between universalism and conventionalism about justice.