This dissertation explores the relationship between individuals’ everyday actions and the justice or injustice of entire societies. It is a conceptual and sociological investigation of the practical demands of justice and their relationship to those of personal ethics. Although neutral on the substance of justice, it nevertheless has significant normative implications. I argue that justice requires individuals to build, support and conform to just institutions and practices, but that its demands do not apply to choices made within a just framework of rules. This ‘moral division of labor’ between justice and ethics has been criticized for ignoring the quotidian reality of social relations and, more generally, for drastically underestimating the ethical demands of justice; objections famously summarized by the feminist slogan ‘the personal is political’. I develop a revisionary everyday practice conception of justice that avoids these concerns. I reject the traditional methodological focus of political philosophy on governing institutions, particularly the legally coercive institutions of sovereign states, and the related idea that individuals can and should further justice primarily through political activities like voting and protesting. I argue that individuals help to enact and reshape prevailing institutions and practices by way of innumerable everyday acts that conform to, monitor and enforce their constitutive rules. The demands of justice apply to the norms and practices of any group of people who share a socially normative practice; not just political communities but also, for example, families, languages and crowds. Individuals are therefore required to undertake everyday direct action to try to abolish or reform their unjust practices by ceasing to impose or conform to their rules. This is likely to involve people pursuing a significant ethical transformation, due to the inevitably formative influence of prevailing practices and the number of overlapping and nested communities of practice in which people participate. Individuals are required to abjure or transform any desires, traits and relationships that are predicated upon their participation in unjust practices. This shows that, independently of questions of substance, people in unjust societies are inevitably required to change the way they live, not just the way they vote.
Syme, Timothy David,
"Everyday Life and the Demands of Justice"
(2015).
Philosophy Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.7301/Z0Z036JJ
