Why does justice have good consequences?
- Highlight Loc. 266-82 | Added on Wednesday, January 11, 2012, 03:12 PM
Hence justice must be understood as a means, not as an ultimate end. But here again there are two options; justice is either an external means or an internal means. An external means bears a causal or instrumental relation to its end, while an internal means bears a logical or constitutive relation to its end. If Freud is right, then my motive in writing this address was to win "fame, fortune, and the love of women." This would be an example of an external means. (What the causal mechanism is I’m not sure.) By contrast, playing this particular chord here -- Kevin was supposed to provide me with a calliope at this point, or at the very least with two elephants who would trumpet in different keys, but I guess you’ll have to use your imagination -- playing this particular chord here is an internal means to playing the Moonlight Sonata. I'm not playing the chord as an end in itself; the chord's value to me lies in its contribution to the whole sonata. So the chord is a means -- but not an external means. One test for the difference is to see whether it makes sense to wish for the end without the means. It makes sense to say, "I wish I could achieve fame, fortune, and the love of women without having to compose this Presidential Address," because the means and the end are logically separable; but it doesn’t make sense to say, "I wish I could play the Moonlight Sonata without having to play all these notes." Just these notes, played in just this sequence, constitute the Moonlight Sonata; there’s nothing we could count as playing the Moonlight Sonata without playing the particular sequence of notes of which it is composed. Now if the value of justice lies in its being an external means to some end, then it makes sense to wish for the end without having to use the means -- in which case we're entangled once again in the same sort of paradox that afflicts indirect consequentialism. Indeed, I think any theory that sees justice as a solution to a problem, or sees rights as a device for protecting people’s interests, is in danger of running afoul of the same paradox, so long as the means and the end are treated as logically separable -- in which case many of liberal rights theory’s most ardently anti-utilitarian thinkers, from Rawls and Dworkin to Rand and Rothbard, are skating on thin ice over a utilitarian abyss.
