Justice as a Public Basis for Legitimacy

Abstract

Philosophical critics of the idea of justice have been motivated by a misperception of this idea: they depicted it as an ideological device for rationalizing our desire to castigate and dominate others in a pharisaic and self-righteous way. They "debunk" the hegemonic function of justice that reproduces and reinforces our self-centered will to power.
I will correct this misperception by showing that the truth is the other way around. I argue that the test of reversibility implied by the universalistic idea of justice requires us to carry out a searching self-critical scrutiny of justifiability of our rights-claims and power-claims to others by imagining ourselves not just in their places but in their perspectives. This means that justice requires us to transcend our self-centeredness and seek for public reasons that are intelligible and acceptable both from our own and the others' viewpoints.
I also argue that the idea of public justification inherent in the idea of justice guides us in designing a fair political decision-making system that accommodates and resolves the value conflicts about what constitutes public reasons. The political corollaries of the universalistic justice that serve this purpose are the liberal idea of the priority of jusitce over specific conceptions of the good life and the idea of critical democracy that integrates constitutional protection of minority rights on a fair and principled basis with the promotion of the public-spirited democratic deliberation that overcomes the vices of interest-group pluralism.