Economic justice in religious discussion
What is economic justice? Most economists shrug at the question. Conventional wisdom is that justice is either irrelevant or impossible to define, and therefore has no place in positive economics.
Unfortunately they’re wrong on both counts. Justice is relevant because disagreements over policy almost always turn on questions of fairness, not efficiency. And though justice is notoriously hard to define, injustice isn’t—at least in a wide range of cases—which means we can get at the question indirectly to an extent that lets us have useful conversations rather than throwing up our hands with the rhetorical smirk “Who’s to say?” Everyone in the theater boos when the bad guy takes a cheap shot. Maybe there are more cases like that than we think.
In any case, the point of this post is to persuade you to download and read the following essay, which had a profound impact on my own thinking on this: “Economic Justice in Religious Discussion” (PDF—2.5MB) by economist Paul Heyne. The punchline is on page seven under “Justice, expectations, and promises”:
It seems to me that our reflections on economic justice would be far more satisfactory if we recognized the connection between justice and the keeping of promises. I have increasingly come to think of justice as basically the fulfillment of legitimate expectations. ...Injustice is done, I suggest, when someone’s legitimate expectations are not fulfilled because others broke their promises. (emphasis in original.)
I first read this essay eight years ago, and I’ve probably thought about that definition of justice more times than any other idea since. It’s not a new one—it goes all the way back to David Hume’s A Treatise on Human Nature (Book III, Part II, Sections I-VI)—but it easily has the highest ratio of usefulness to complexity of anything else in the toolbox. Enjoy.
Posted by Andrew on Saturday April 30, 2005 | Feedback?
