Are humans too bad to act justly?

Gornick has written a review, marked by genuine curiosity, of Sandel’s new book, Justice: What’s The Right Thing To Do? The book tours through the philosophical history of justice from the ancients to Rawls and beyond. Gornick, though, admits that she is a newcomer to the subject, and considers a general puzzle: how does all this theory square with the imperfection of the real world? More precisely, Gornick observes that for all the attempts that religious leaders and scholars have made to codify the norms of justice, real people tend to break the rules consistently.  She has her finger on an important problem in political philosophy and ethics, and one that often widens the gap between the theory of justice and practical matters like living a just life and creating a just community. The problem is moral psychology.

Even in the early days of political philosophy, authors took note of moral psychology—the constraints that human psychology places on the creation of a moral system. When Plato dreamed up his just city in The Republic, he first imagined a city where people lived without luxuries, but his interlocutor protested against this drab city: a theory of justice would have to account for the human psychological need for luxury. The same efforts to match justice to human psychology continue today. Consider, for instance, the famous ‘nudge’ of behavioral economics. Coined by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, the nudge is the idea that a policy maker can increase the likelihood of a citizens bringing about a desirable (or just) outcome for a society by incentivizing the choices consistent with that outcome or merely by making the right choices the default ones. Ethicists and political theorists increasingly are taking this kind of strategy seriously: people are predictably just when put in situations that encourage just action—situations that leverage the quirks of human psychology. So, Gornick is right to note that there is a gap between the theory of justice and just action, and the way to fill the gap is to let theory determine the just society and economics and psychology determine how to encourage people to realize that society with their everyday choices.