In thinking about justice, and about morality more generally, the traditions of Aristotle and Locke have had a powerful influence. Both have been adapted to contemporary life in constitutional democracies.
‘Sanitized’ is perhaps a better description, particularly in the case of Aristotle. It would appear at first sight that Aristotle and Locke conflict but we think this is a superficial observation. Locke is indeed a severe individualist, while Aristotle stresses the social nature of the human animal: how an individual is, in her/his very identity, in her/his very humanity, a part of a greater whole.
The very structure of our choices, the beings that we are, the very ‘I’ that is part of a ‘we’, are inescapably the expressions of a distinctive social ethos.
And this, of course, includes the values and norms we have, our very most primitive conceptions of what is right, just and desirable.Locke, by contrast, sees individuals as independent.
He views them as people capable of living in a state of nature, independent, tolerant of differences, seeking knowledge and concerned to protect their autonomy or self-ownership. A Lockean ethic will be concerned most fundamentally with the protection of individual rights.
This individualist stress need not conflict with Aristotle’s, or for that matter Hegel’s, stress on the deep and irreversible way we are social animals through and through: how our very identity is formed by our society.Individualists, with a Lockean orientation, need not ignore their own past and how they are formed by a particular ethos with its distinctive structure of norms.
We are socialized in distinctive ways that are inescapable and are a condition for our being human. But we need not be prisoners of our socialization.
We are all distinctive sorts of human beings formed by a particular ethos, but within limits.Sometimes, when we are a certain sort of person and fortunately situated, we can change our ethos, moving it in different directions in part as a function of our thoughts, desires, will and actions.
And almost always we can by our distinctive reactions situate ourselves in patterns of our own choosing or partly of our own choosing, though set, and inescapably, in the distinctive social context in which we find ourselves. These thoughts do not, of course, come from nowhere.
They are not simply the creation of the person who thinks them. But they also are not unaffected by the individual.
They are their own and they reflect who they distinctively are People—or at least a not inconsiderable number of people—think of what kind of world they want and they have the ability to reflect carefully on what kind of world they have, including what distinctive kind of social creatures they and their fellows are, and they sometimes can, under propitious circumstances, forge a world a little more to their own liking, including to their own reflective and knowledgeable liking. There need be no conflict between a Lockean individualism and an Aristotelian stress on our social formation.
Where we may find conflict between Aristotle and Locke is over what is just and over how justice is to be understood. Aristotle’s conception of a proper social order, a best regime, is that of a hierarchical world in which magnificent and magnanimous aristocrats rule and in which slaves do everything else.
Human flourishing, so important for Aristotle, seems to be very much for the rulers alone. Locke was no egalitarian, but in the state of nature all human beings are free and their natural rights function to preserve and extend their autonomy: their self-ownership.
The autonomy and self-ownership we are talking about is something that is to be sought for all human beings capable of autonomy and self-ownership. The moral import of the structure of rights is to protect the autonomy and self-ownership of all.
Classes and strata there will be, but it is Locke’s conception that these divisions will not cut so deep as to undermine self-ownership and the natural rights of all human beings.
People may have their stations and their duties but they are all, as creatures of God, free and stand with respect to self-ownership and the rights of humans in a condition of equality. A just social order cannot, as in an Aristotelian conception of social justice, allow a society of slaves or serfs where for some people resources external to them are properly subject entirely to communal control such that they, having no control, or very little control, of the means of life, have their autonomy undermined.