 Welcome to Free Thoughts, a podcast project at the Cato Institute's Libertarianism.org. Free Thoughts is a show about libertarianism and the ideas that influence it. I'm Aaron Powell, a research fellow here at Cato and editor of Libertarianism.org. And I'm Trevor Burrus, a research fellow at the Cato Institute Center for Constitutional Studies. Our topic for today's episode is justice as a virtue. Joining us is Professor Mark Labar from Ohio University. He's also the author of a new book, The Value of Living Well. Before we go to the historical takes on the idea of justice as a virtue that you outline in your paper, I thought maybe we could start by just explaining that term a bit. So what does it mean to say something is a virtue? Right, well the notion of a virtue has undergone quite a bit of change in Western society in the last century or so, I suppose, especially relative to what the Greeks meant by it. And the sense that I'm trying to deploy the term is one that goes back to the Greek conception. In modern philosophy it can be used to refer to any kind of an admirable trait, any kind of advantageous feature that something or someone has in the 19th century. You know, there's sort of these Victorian associations of chastity and sexual self-control. None of that is present in the kind of Aristotelian picture that I'm endorsing. So when I'm thinking of a virtue, I'm thinking of it as, number one, a traitor quality of character. And that's to say that it's an enduring feature of not only someone's motivational propensities, the things that they find themselves gravitating towards doing, but also a way that their apprehension of the world that they're acting in is shaped. So that, for example, someone who's courageous, courage is sort of one of the standard virtues for all the Greeks. Someone who's courageous sees the world in such a way that opportunities for courageous conduct are salient. It's not the case that they will back away from situations that require courage because they just don't notice that courage is called for in a situation. Their sensitivity to the world is shaped by that virtue. So these traits like courage count as virtues in virtue of being, partly in virtue of being, stable features of one's character. It's not just something that comes or goes or that you find yourself for no particular reason, being motivated to act in accordance with, on a particular occasion, they're stable. And for the Greeks also, it was an important feature of virtues that they conduced to one's living a life that one finds a good life. So you can imagine, for example, a sadist thinking, well, geez, I've got the virtue of cruelty. It's stable. It's enduring. That shapes my apprehension of the world. But that's not going to count as a virtue. In fact, it's going to count as a vice because, characteristically, cruelty is not part of a way of approaching the world that we find fits with a life that's a good life for the person who's living it. So it's an ethical theory about living well. That's right. It's an ethical story and the notion of living well is an ethical conception of living well. This is another, I think, really important difference between us and the way that the Greeks thought of virtue and thought, for example, of happiness and well-being. They did not think of those as being independent concepts. It didn't occur to them in asking what kind of life they wanted to live, what that might be independent of and prior to thinking about the demands of morality. To them, it seemed as natural as anything to think, well, of course, living virtuously is going to be a part of that. So we, very often, I think there's a really pronounced tendency, especially amongst philosophers, maybe more generally, tend to think of the world in a way that's paradigmatically modern. And we think there's a story about individual happiness. Maybe that's having our desires satisfied. Maybe it's experiencing pleasure. Maybe it's some more complex story. But each of us has this potential for happiness, this life that we'd like to live out. But of course, we find ourselves living in a shared world. And in virtue of that shared world, we've got to accept some constraints. And morality on this picture then is the story about the constraints that limit us in the pursuit of this independent conception of what a good life for us would be. So do these constraints then in the virtues, are they constraining in the sense that if we didn't follow these constraints, we likely wouldn't lead good lives. So if we want to lead good lives, we need to live virtuously, which includes these constraints? Well, the contrast that I have in mind is one that really sets aside the idea of a good life and constraints. There certainly are constraints built in and some of the virtues certainly constrain us in various ways. But the idea is that the constraints are part of the life that we want to live. In other words, we're going to think it's good for us to live in ways that are not unconstrained in a variety of ways. So we don't have a good life and then face constraints that are alien to it that limit us in our pursuit of our good lives. And that set of constraints being morality instead, the way that we conceive of a life that we want to live is one that understands that we live live socially. And living socially means understanding that there's ways that it's good for us to be limited in what we can or do or want or aspire to do with or to other people. Then is this, does virtue ethics then, is it kind of, it sounds almost like it could be a form of consequentialism in the sense that what we want, that good at which we aim is the good life. And if we want that, then there are these certain rules we need to follow. And so we're following them because the consequences of them living virtuously is a good life. That's not, well, depending on what you mean, I think it's not a form of consequentialism as philosophers normally use that term for a couple of reasons. One is that typical forms of consequentialism like utilitarianism say are maximizing conceptions. They say there's a good out there and what you have reason to do is to maximize as much of that good as you possibly can. So if you're a hedonist, the good is pleasure and your rational aim in so far as you're adhering to the theory is to either, if you're an egoist, experience as much pleasure for yourself or if you're a utilitarian to maximize the amount of pleasure that's felt by all agents. So there's a maximizing notion that's entirely missing. It's not that maximizing doesn't ever show up, but it's not at all dominant in the conception of what we should do. That's all more of that moderation in a lot of ways for at least for Aristotelian levels. In lots of ways that's correct. There's going to be stories about balance and appropriateness and fittingness and none of those really fit with maximizing stories. Well, if it's not, if there isn't a maximizing, then does that mean there aren't, I guess, degrees of a good life such that like one life could be good, but another life could be better? Because if there are, then maybe there's a best at which we're seeking to maximize. Right. So the danger of, you can do that and you can for just, I think just about any theory that's normative that says that you ought to do something or one thing is better than another. You can grammatically put it in the form of maximization. So if you're determined to consequentialize it, you can say, you tell me what you think is better and what you think is worse and give me a series of comparative judgments and I will give you back a formula that says you ought to maximize this, whatever the thing this is that's comprising this scale of better and worse. But that's a sort of trivial form of maximization because it isn't anything that can be understood or formulated. It can't figure into rational deliberations. It's entirely an exposed conception of what you're trying to do. So I think I resist the idea of thinking that if you have norms, if you say that one thing is better than another, it's better to do one thing than or better to do one thing rather than another, that that can be put into a consequentialist framework. So the other, sorry, go ahead. So the other ethics, the consequentialist ethics and also deontological would be applying those two in terms of quandaries, right? In terms of actual problems, usually problems that are given to you, but that's also not what virtue ethics tends to do. No, but there are moral quandaries. I think any plausible theory has to take account of them and really good virtue ethical theorists have a lot to say about moral dilemmas. Rosland Hearst House, for example, has written extensively on what dilemmas look like from within a virtue perspective. So I don't think those go away. Any moral theory that said that there weren't moral quandaries would be a theory for, yeah, it wouldn't be for us. I do want to go back to the other point that I wanted to make against a consequentialist reading of this, because with the exception of one ancient group, the Epicureans, the Greeks, so here I'm thinking of Plato and Aristotle and the Stoics primarily, would all have said it's not just that living virtuously is necessary for living a good life. They wouldn't say just that living a good life is the goal or the end that we seek for its own sake, but they also thought, also thought at the same time that virtue was desirable itself for its own sake. So Aristotle says this explicitly that virtue is something that's desirable both for its own sake and for the sake of something further, namely a good life. And that structure of ends or goals, final ends, as the Greeks thought of them, that give us reason for action. That's a structure of rational authority and value that just doesn't fit within consequentialist pictures. There's a conception of reasons for action that is completely wonky from the standpoint of maximizing consequentialist theory. And so as I say, you can if you want gerrymand or a maximizing picture out of it, but the maximizing picture is going to have nothing to do with the actual constituents of what such a theory says we have reason to do. Okay, well then let's turn to this historical account of justice as a virtue, some of the ways that various ancient Greeks and ancient Greek schools looked at it. Which seems weird by itself because we don't really talk about justice as a virtue, seemingly in modern political discourse, but historically you say that they did a lot. Yeah, that's right. I think one of the points that I make in the paper is that it seems to me that most modern discourse about justice is about social justice. It's about the justice of societies or institutions or laws or countries or practices or what have you. And it's not that that kind of discourse is completely alien to the Greeks, but it's not where they're thinking about justice started. When they were thinking of justice, they were thinking of it as like courage, say, as a virtue that individual people could have or not. So in the same way that individual people could be courageous, they could also be just or they could be unjust. And when they began thinking about justice, therefore their thinking wasn't, well, you know, how do we understand a society to be just? Their thinking was what is it for an individual to be just? Now, an important sort of qualification of this is a big qualification is Plato's Republic, which has as its explicit topic, justice and the nature of justice. And there notoriously Socrates, when he's being queried about what justice consists in, he says, well, actually, in the same way that somebody who's trying to read a sign might prefer to read the larger text in order to make sense of the smaller text, will have better luck in understanding justice if we look at what makes for a just society, and then scale back and understand how that's supposed to work in the individual. But I think that actually bears out my point that the question that they were asking Socrates is, what is it for me to be a just person? And why should I aspire to be a just person? And Socrates ends up introducing this end run into thinking about a just society, which turns out to be a very abstract and strange society, mostly, I think, cultivated for the sake of what Socrates thinks it will show about individuals and their moral psychology. That's its purpose. Its purpose is supposed to be exemplary. It's like, it's not like they really care about what a just society is. They care about what justice is in an individual. And that's the way that Socrates chooses to go and make that case. You don't find anything like that in Aristotle. In the central ethical books, in Aristotle's ethical works, justice is a set of norms that govern what the just person does in treating others. So if there's thinking about sort of macro-level social thinking, it seems to be, as I call it on the paper, something like a compositional story where if you want a just society, what you do is you have just people. And having just people gives you a just society rather than the other way around. And that would have been Aristotle's view, you think? I think so, yeah. You know, again, Aristotle is a subtle thinker. And I'm not, he's to say that I'm not an Aristotle specialist or an Aristotle scholar. So I have no doubt that Aristotle at various points feels at liberty to use justice and injustice as predicates of societies. But the primary home for them is in thinking about individuals and their characters. Can you maybe give us, you told us how Plato talks about the justice as a virtue. But can you give us kind of the quick takeaway of what he actually thought justice was in the individual? Sure. Yeah. So what he imagined, so to understand what it is in the individual, he thinks, oh, okay, you can see that if we use bigger text. Let's look at the society and the society. So he imagines building a society, a polis from the ground up. And what he thinks is to have this polis work effectively, there need to be basically three classes of people. There are the guardians, there are the rulers, and there are sort of the people who go around making and doing all the stuff that has to be done. And he thinks these groups have different, in the just city, they have different tasks. So there's people who are going to be making laws and sort of carrying out the executive functions of the city. And then there's going to be the militia, the people that actually defend the city and where need be used force to maintain order. And then there are those who are under the direction of the executives and sort of doing their own work in the city, whether they're cobblers or whatever their job is. And he thinks injustice occurs when people in those groups ignore the tasks that it's right for them to perform. And instead, take on the tasks that ought to be performed by people in another group. So when the warriors decide, oh, we don't just want to be in the war making business, we want to be in the law making business, that counts as a form of injustice. And certainly when the people in the city that are satisfying its appetites for food and clothing and what have you, if they decide to rule, then you have a real problem. So he thinks that the justice of the just city is each kind of, each class or each person doing its own work. That's what, and that's the analysis he gives, it's just as is each having and doing its own work. So sort of being the proper part of the machine and fulfilling your role in the right way is to practice justice as a virtue. That's right. The justice of the city consists in each of those parties exactly performing that task in the whole. And so then there's a direct analogy, he thinks, to the human psyche, which at least in the Republic, not everywhere, but in the Republic he thinks of is having three parts. It has a rational part that really sort of should be the ruling element. It has a passion part, emotional part that comes to the aid of reason, right, and in saying getting angry and striking back if attacked. Then it has a desirous part and a petitive part. And each of those parts has its own function to play in the economy of the individual. And a just individual is one in which each of those parts is doing its own work, in which an injustice occurs when you have either the passions or the desires attempting to take over the task of ruling. That's what injustice is. It's right. We're appetite, you know, and the characteristic form of injustice is pleonexia, which is overreaching or greed. Right. And the idea is you can sort of think of the Plato's thinking, well, think about an unjust person say who's grasping or cheating or something like that. What's going on is their appetite for the goods that other people have is overreaching the rule that they should be imposing on their own appetites in favor of getting these objects of desire, whatever they are. So his diagnosis of that form of injustice is just that, you know, the appetites are running the show. It's no longer the ruling part, the reason that's running the show for them. It's these appetites. They've taken over. They're not doing their job anymore. They have a job and they're not doing it. And the rational part has a job and it's not being allowed to do it. And so things have gotten wonky. That's right. Inside the soul of the just person. And then bad things are going to happen. And he extends the analogies to dysfunctional forms of government. He thinks those all have analogues inside people whose souls are failing to satisfy the requirements of justice. But the just soul, the one that has this virtue is one in which each of these parts is doing its own work. And then his student Aristotle had a different take on this, right? A different sense of what it means to have this characteristic of justice. Yeah, typically, Aristotle doesn't tell that kind of story. When he's writing about justice as a virtue, he's mostly writing about the, this is now a modern, and maybe it's just my idiosyncratic way of casting this. Aristotle is thinking about there being norms governing the actions that the just person performs. So for example, in distributing some good, you know, suppose we've got a pie or something like that. And I see that there are eight of us. And each of us is entitled to an equal share. So as a just person, I'm going to cut the pie into eight pieces or something. But then I, then let's say we go into business and you and I go into business and you put up 90% of the capital and you do 90% of the work and, you know, I put up 10% of the capital and do 10% of the work. And now we have $100 in profits. If I'm a just person, I'm not going to say, well, okay, let's go 50, 50. That's not right. You know, the return that each of us gets needs to be proportional to what we've contributed. So the just person is going to be engaging in distribution in a way that's fitting with something like the bases that we see meriting or justifying the distribution in these particular cases. So, so that's justice in distribution. There's also corrective justice. If, you know, if I steal from you $100, a just judge, somebody who's acting justly is going to take from me the unjust addition that I've got, and it's going to restore it to you, making up the unjust shortage that you have. So there's sort of an arithmetical restorative element. That's restorative. That's right. So Aristotle is thinking about these, about justice in terms of these norms and trying to understand what norms I think it is that are guiding the just person. Insofar as they're engaging in these various different kinds of transactions with other people. And then the Stoics, you also say have a different view too, even than Aristotle. Well, the Stoics view, the Stoics fit into this story in a, I think, a significantly different way. They actually say very little about justice per se. They don't mean it's not that they are not cognizant of it or don't mention it, but it doesn't play any kind of significant role in their theory. In the paper, the role that I give to Stoic thinking about justice is that the Stoics, for the first time, think, think as cosmopolitan. So they think in the sense that they think the bounds of moral obligation don't end at the borders of the policy. There's not something distinctive about what I owe to another person as a person that changes if you're not Greek or not Athenian or something like that. Instead, in virtue of being a person, in virtue of having this rationality that they think is central to human agency, that's what entitles you to certain kinds of moral consideration. And that's new. I mean, this happens within a couple hundred years of Christianity. Christianity is influenced by cosmopolitan element in Stoic thought. It seems like an important development. It's a huge development. It's really important for Western thought. It seems pretty modern too. I mean, it seems the way that a lot of us think about how we ought to treat other people. It is. There's an ongoing debate amongst political philosophers as to the extent to which cosmopolitanism is right as opposed to think. So there's a real challenge to a lot of modern political theory and practice posed by cosmopolitanism precisely because the cosmopolitan thinks that political boundaries are not significant or salient moral boundaries for lots and lots of reasons. They think for me to discriminate between someone who's my countryman and somebody who belongs in another country, as in terms of there being significant moral differences in terms of what I owe them, there's not much difference. And so there are others who think cosmopolitanism doesn't make very much sense. Of course we have significant obligations to people in our lands and our societies that we don't have to others. That's an ongoing lively debate. I think the Stoics established terms for that debate that I think the burden is to show why we should think that political boundaries have any kind of moral significance. And then the last Greek school that you talk about, the Epicureans, at least in the quick version you give, seems even more like how we often think about modern political questions. Yeah, I think you're right about that in a couple ways. One is that the Epicureans are much closer to this modern conception of, that I was describing earlier, of thinking that morality and moral norms function as constraints on an independent pursuit of our own happiness. They are their hedonists and so they're thinking the happiness is a certain kind of state of the soul that you're actually trying to maximize. But we live in a shared world and justice is a way of peacefully mediating the conflicts that are going to arise. And so they have this sort of what's come to be thought of as a contractualist view of justice, that it's a matter of striking a bargain between ourselves and others to limit our pursuit of our own happiness if they will do likewise. So it's a very, it's a, it's a much more modern social contractarian. Yeah, that's right. And the other, the other thing for them is that that's different is that they alone of these ancient schools don't see the virtue as being good for its own sake. They think virtue is good merely in terms of the further purposes that it serves. So they're instrumentalists about virtue. And that too is I think a much more modern notion. So there's a number of ways in which they they sort of stand out as exceptional amongst the Greek schools. And then you in the paper, you then close out your section on historical accounts of justice as a virtue by jumping quite a few years to Kant. Yeah. And if you, yeah, and also many people would think jumping schools, Kant doesn't seem to be much concerned with virtue. That's sort of a classical conception, but, but you bring us some interesting points about him. Well, he is. Kant certainly does have a theory of virtue, but that that's, I think not at the center of his view. Kant is interesting from my perspective, because he, he's, he's one of, I think, two major bridges from the ancient world to, to the kind of discourse that we find ourselves engaging in and thinking about justice. Now the other being David Hume, whom I don't talk about in the paper, but Hume certainly has an extended discussion of justice in his work. And Kant is responding to human much of what he does. Kant is thinking of justice not as a property of individuals, but he's thinking of it as a property of interactions between individuals. And he thinks there's a story to be told about justice that's pre-political. That is to say, we can speak of relations between individuals as being subject to the demands of justice. And we can do that independently of thinking about a political order or a state. And in fact, the, his thinking about why we have states and why we need states follows as a consequence of his thinking about just relations between individuals. So he's not, he's not thinking about justice as a virtue, but he is still thinking about justice as being, so to speak, a micro property, a property of individuals and their relations rather than as a story of a, rather than as a macro property of larger scale public, social and public institutions. That's right. And, but you then, you then make the argument when you move into kind of talking about the virtue of justice and from a modern standpoint that I think one of the, one of the concerns you have about all of these accounts is that they don't quite get, is it the reasons for being just right? And this is somehow tied into what you, you call a second person reasons for acting. Yeah. So the, the line of thought about second personal reasons is, it's a pretty recent development. This has been within the last 10 to 20 years in Anglophone moral philosophy, but it's a line of thought that actually goes back to Kant and his immediate heirs, Fichte in particular. And it's of noticing that there's at least two different ways of, importantly different ways of thinking about why it is that we might have reasons of various sorts to treat others with respect, let's say. So Steve Darwall is the one who wrote a book called Second Personal Standpoint back in 2006 in which he develops the idea of second personal reasons. And it's, I think it's been influential on a number of people besides myself, but I think it's certainly germane here. Darwall's thinking is that one way of understanding are reasons for treating other people well, let's say, you know, not assaulting them or something like that. One way to do that is to think about, think about others and our obligations to them in a way that, say, consequentialists might think about them. And that way would be this, that we'd think, well, there's some value out there. Let's, let's say it's happiness. And, and I'm under a rational imperative to maximize that happiness for a variety of reasons. If I engage in assaulting other people, I'm actually going to be destroying happiness. It might make me happy, but it'll make you sad and it'll make you sadder than it'll make me happy, certainly in the aggregate. So if I'm really responding to that value appropriately, I'm going to forbear from assaulting you. And the reason that I have for assaulting you, that on this picture runs through the interest that I have or the reason that I have to promote that value, namely happiness or maximum total happiness or something like that. That's one way of thinking about how it is that we might have responsibilities to treat other people. That's, that's the contrast class for what Darwall is interested in. Darwall thinks the other way to think about the reasons that I have for not assaulting you have to do with some story about my apprehension of you and the fact that you and the kind of being that you are, who you are, itself gives me a reason and not to assault you. And, and it does so in a way that's, uh, that fits much better with our moral practices. Well, it sounds almost like means to means are an ends type of concept. Well, it, it can, uh, there's a Contian way of putting this point, which is treating others as means and not merely his ends. But there's a point to this, uh, to this story that, uh, Darwall picks up on Darwall and, uh, uh, uh, TM Scanlon's the other major figure in, in modern contractualist thought who's developed this point, and they bring out this feature that's actually missing in Kant, um, and, and doesn't develop really until fish day. And that's that, um, if I assault you, the problem isn't, so to speak, just what I've done to the, uh, compilation of happiness, but I actually owe you something. Um, if I assault you, you and I are in a too personal moral relation that, and, and you have a standing with me, you have, uh, bearing on what I ought to be thinking about that nobody else has. Um, you're in position, for example, to forgive me. I'm in position where I'm accountable to you for what I have done to you or for what I'm thinking of doing to you in a way that I am not to anybody else. And if we think that our responsibility is to promote the value, it's very hard to see why you as my victim should have this special moral standing. Let me give you an, uh, an example of where something like this occurs and we get this curiosity. This is going to be another historical example and it's Locke. So in, in Locke's, uh, Locke's second treatise, uh, Locke start begins with his conception of the law of nature and he says, look, you know, here's the story about the law of nature. The law of nature forbids us from harming others and it actually requires that we help others under certain conditions, but we can advance our own interests, but we must, must not harm others. And Locke says, and the reason for this is Locke's got a, uh, sort of standard theistic story here. We're all God's creatures. God made us. We're God's property. Actually, um, God laid down this law and God is authoritative, you know, gets to, to give us the law. So you and I are under this law, the law of nature, because God has made us, uh, and we're his property, uh, which, which is good as far as it goes. But now it turns out that if I assault you, we say, well, you know, whom, whom have I offended? It turns out the person I've offended is God, right? It's God's law that I've broken. Now I've broken his law by assaulting you, but it's sort of, you happen to be just sort of the occasion on which I offend God. I violate the obligation that I have to God. Surely there's a story about something that I've done to you. And of course, Locke thinks we can punish and all kinds of things like that. But the first, but that sort of ultimate moment of moral accountability is to God as the author of this law. Uh, and that from the standpoint of this sort of second personal way of thinking about moral requirements, that has things, 180 degrees back to front. The first point is that I'm responsible to you for not assaulting you, for treating you respectfully, treating you well. The first point is that I'm accountable to you when I fail to do so. And the problem that's there to be fixed is with you. Others may have an interest in this. God may have an interest in this. But the first point is that it's a story about the relation between us. There's a second personal relationship. And I have a second personal reason not to assault you that arises from you, not from a value, not from a law, not from anything else. So if, if this reason arises from the other person, how does that tie into a virtue ethical account that the, you know, that the ultimate reason behind these virtues and behind behaving in a certain way and having these characteristics is because it leads to, or is part of, or is constituent of the good life for me. Because this, and this gets to an objection to virtue ethics that I have heard from others, that it gets exactly this kind of problem of moral motivation wrong because it ties everything back to what's good for me. Or perhaps if you didn't have the second person conception, then you would use other people to maximize your virtue indiscriminately. Is that part of the idea? Well, not really, because I think the ancients can say this, that virtue is, is going to involve an appreciation for other things. And people, for example, Aristotle has a wonderful discussion of friendship in which he, there's a really rich appreciation of what other people can, can be as friends. And so, so I think I don't want to go so far as to say that it would sort of be open season from a virtue perspective without this kind of insight. But I do think this is a place in which there's real advance in the last couple hundred years in our understanding of these features of our moral lives that the ancients didn't have. And but, but your question is right on the money. This is a, it's a, it's a deep question. And for many people, it's not just for many moral philosophers, it's not just a objection. It's the objection. It's a show stopping objection to virtue. Yeah, right. And in particular, the Aristotelian kind that I'm defending, that it looks like, right, if virtues are traits that you're supposed to have for the sake of being happy. Well, now the suggestion is that we're supposed to have reasons coming out of the nature of other people. You know, which is it? How are these compatible? And that's reconciling those points has been my project now for a number of years. And I have a paper that came out a few years ago with a sort of preliminary take on it. And the book, which I published last year has that as the concluding payoff. And it, and it's actually not an exaggeration to say the rest of the book was written so that I could write that chapter. Because I think getting that story straight is something that requires careful thought about both what our good is like, what our reasons are like, the sources of reasons, what it means to see other people as giving us reasons, how the reasons that we have in virtue of the nature of other people fit in with this sort of ultimate end of being happy, of eudaimonia to use the Greek term. And that's a messy picture. I think it does work. I think the story is right. And a big part of it is that goes back actually to the feature of consequentialist thought that I was complaining about earlier in claiming that on the Greek view, an Aristotle's view in particular, there's no incoherence in saying of say the virtue of justice that it's good for its own sake and also good for the sake of a further end that it advances, namely being happy. That structure, that rational structure of having ends that are good for their own sake and also and that not being in competition with saying, oh yeah, and also they serve this end, to me that's the key in being able to meet that objection. It also seems to have some intuitive appeal to a to a large extent. I think so. I think actually the structure of thinking about ends in that way is really natural. We think about it and I think we think sort of implicitly in that structure about a whole lot of our goals and ends that we see them as worth doing for their own sake at the same time recognizing that they advance other of our ends in doing so. So that they have both to use the Greek term, the final value, the reason-giving force, and then also serve these instrumental purposes. And the story that I want to tell is that in so far as justice as a virtue involves seeing others in these second personal ways, that that means that I see you as being a source of reasons for me. There's just things I'm not going to undertake with you because I will use a hammer to pound nails, but I'm not going to use your hand to pound nails partly because I recognize there's a big difference between you and a hammer, right? You're a person and the hammer's not. So that figures into my reasoning and when I am thinking about how I'm going to treat you, the reasons that I see as provided by you are for your sake. You are the source of reasons that I have, but that's compatible with my thinking at the same time. It's really good for me. It's good for me that I am the kind of being that is capable of standing in this relation with you and of seeing you as being a person who's reason-giving in this way. And those two stories about the kinds of reasons that I have, they're connected, they're related, they're deeply related, but they're really answering different questions. One question is, how should I treat you? What are the permissible or good or advisable or virtuous ways in which I can engage with you in our dealings? And there the answers to those questions are provided in the first instance by the kind of thing you are, namely another human being. A second question is why then I should care, why I should be the kind of being that treats others that way. And now there's a story about my happiness, but that's an answer to a different question. So I think your objection is sound. In fact, Darwell explicitly claims that the story about second personal reasons is not one that will fit in a virtue picture. So I think that's a, it's a very widely shared objection. I've tried to meet it and I think it can be met. And this is all in your book. So if we want to see how you meet this question, we should look there. Yeah. Yeah. The value of living well that published last year through Oxford has, it's really that story, sort of from the ground up and concluding with an account of there what I call accountability relations. It's this way of seeing ourselves as engaged with others in this second personal way, which it's not just that they give us reasons, but we're accountable to them for how we act on those reasons or fail to. Then I guess let's go into the kind of the last section of your paper where you take all of these ideas and use them to suggest ways that we can think about justice as a virtue today. And specifically you end up create this kind of distinction between what you call compositional conceptions of justice and structural conceptions. Right. So the, that contrast really captures the point that I was making earlier about what seemed to me, again, these are very broad pictures, but a picture from the ancients and thinking about justice as a feature of individuals and even in through Kant of their relations to modern work on justice in, especially in political philosophy and political theory, where justice in the first thing, the justice that we're concerned with is a property of institutions, societies, practices, laws. It's almost as if people wouldn't even think of it as a quality. Like the idea of the just society being something where all the people are being just, that's really not how we talk anymore. That's right. So you can imagine two different, you can imagine someone agreeing with that and saying a just society is a society of just individuals. But that way of putting things covers two different ways of understanding what that relation is. And that's what the distinction I'm between the compositional and structural stories is supposed to be. One way of thinking about that is to say, yeah, the individuals in the just society are just individuals because they are complying with or elements in a scheme of social organization, that's just. So the society itself is just and the justice of the individuals somehow has to be understood in terms of that social structure. Which sounds kind of like Plato, oddly with the I'm going to say no. Okay. So just to see an individual. So yeah, there's at a first pass, that's true that in the just city. Well, actually, there's a big problem with understanding what Plato thinks about that in the in the Republic is in the just society where each is doing their own work. Does that require that the individuals have just souls? Plato doesn't say and scholars have beat each other's brains out. So I'm not sure about that. It's certainly not true of the idea of justice in the in the individuals, where you have the rational, the emotional or passion and the appetitive parts, each doing their own work. There's no appeal or reference in that. To be right, you don't have to be that story does not for in itself require living in a policy. Now, causally, Plato has no one idea that people would be just would not live in a policy than Aristotle. They they're assuming that but that that micro level story doesn't depend on the macro story. So really, the kind of person that sort of emblemizes this is John Rawls, where we have in theory of justice, where we have principles where Rawls is target is the basic structure of society. And the basic structure of society is the primary bearer of the predicate of the or the property justice. So the what we're interested in is having a just society. What's a just society? Well, it's a society. It's big complex story. And I, no matter what I say, I'm going to oversimplify it. But you know, the big story is it's it's characterized by the basic institutions that shape people's prospects in the society being being determined by these two principles of justice that we determined through this deliberation in the original position and on and on. The basic point is the quarry here is what the property of justice is as it pertains to a society. And then the story about individuals. There's nothing that Rawls says that prohibits individuals from being just in this society. But that the justice in individuals is going to be informed by and shaped by the the primary picture of justice as a property and the institution possibly even subjugated to in the sense that if John Rawls is talking first about structural justice, which at some point requires methods of acting and behaving in order to maintain that structure, maybe they will be asked to do things that are contrary to their personal justice as a virtue issue. Well, you know, that that was Robert Nozick's intuition. And part of the prompt for me in this paper was criticism that Nozick leveled. This is in Anarchy State in Utopia just a year or two after Rawls wrote the book. Nozick isn't talking about justice as a virtue. But he's thinking about he does think about people's judgments about the significance of dessert and of you know, people having what's coming to them in either a good way or a bad way. And Nozick thinks, you know, our judgments about dessert are, of course, we do have institutional, we do think about institutions as needed to provide those. But there's a sense in which there's nothing about dessert that depends on institutions. You and I in our transactions, I can see, you know, back to my little mini business idea, I can see that if you put in 90% of the capital and done 90% of the work, you deserve 90% of the profits. That's a micro level sort of non structural determination. And Nozick argues that in Rawls theory, those judgments seem to be floating in space. There's no place for them. They might be subordinated, as you say, to in fact, they likely are going to be subordinated to the principles that sort of come downstream from these broader structural principles. So the other the other way to think about this relation between individuals and societies is what I call the compositional account. And there, right, we could say we've got a just society and we have just individuals. But there and this I think is explicitly Kant's story. There, we call the society just or the society is just precisely because individuals are comporting themselves justly with each other, either through the virtue of justice or through justice as a property of their transactions as Kant thinks about it. But the story that we tell at the top level about the society is one that's built up of a whole, you know, host of individuals and their character traits and the ways that they engage. Is that a, I guess, more demanding standard in the sense that in the structural conception, a society is just if this handful of institutions say propagate just rules or are themselves just, but in the compositional conception, does it, does that mean that society is only just if everyone in it? Or at least a majority possibly. Yes, some, you know, critical mass is behaving justly. Well, I think it would be true that more people than it seems like it'd be more just if probably except for just one person is just the only unjust person. Yeah, then that would be, but presumably there's more people than institutions. Yes, yeah, true. That has some intuitive appeal. I don't have worked out. In fact, what what I'm doing in this paper that we're talking about here is sort of sketching the distinction and thinking this really would be good to explore because it seems like these are different ways of thinking about the sort of macro level justice and micro level justice. And I haven't done that thinking. I'm hesitant to think that it would be more demanding. If you think about, so I'm thinking now of Rawls, for example, and the moral requirements on citizens in in Rawls, just society are pretty substantial and their Rawls thinks that individuals are capable of responding, recognizing the authority of the norms of social justice and responding to them and internalizing them. And so all of those amount to a significant degree of, I mean, if the demand in us is supposed to be a measure of the degree to which individuals find their treatment of others governed by norms of justice, I think there might not be very much to choose between the two. I think it's really going to be a story about the priority in our understanding of the origins of those norms. Do we think about the norms? So each of us are moral agents. Each of us is a moral agent, and we're engaged in relationships with others of all kinds, friendships and commercial engagements and all kinds of other relationships all the time. And we have to understand what norms are going to guide those relationships. And so the one way to think about it is, well, let's start from the idea of the society that we think is just and try to work our way back. I suppose with Nozick, I'm skeptical about that. And one thing I'm skeptical about is that, and this was Nozick's intuition, we feel much more confident in the aptness of our judgments about particular moral requirements at the micro level. I'm much more confident that in our business where you've done 90% of the work that you should get 90% of the profits. I'm pretty sure about that. What do I think about corporate tax levels in a just society? I have no clue. I mean, it's not that we can't work our way to an answer to that. It's that that process is going to be quite circuitous and informed by complex empirical issues and so forth in a way that my apprehension of what I owe you as an individual, second personally, is not. There's an immediacy to those relationships into the authority that other people, that we can feel it's good for us to experience others as having that kind of authority over in virtue of the kind of being they are. That's immediate and I think clear. Not that there's no moral quandaries and it's not that it's always transparent, but the force of that apprehension I think is quite a different thing. So do you think that possibly one thing I thought when I read your paper was that maybe something had been lost by going over the structural conception of justice so much to the point that we talk about it as a just society and as a role to be playing. So you think about people who sort of divorce agents of the state or divorce themselves from whether or not the structural system is just and maybe if we asked, is what you did today just and asked everyone to think about that way, we could have a better society. I'm very sympathetic with that. And in fact, I think one of the places where this thinking in these terms can be helpful precisely isn't thinking about agents of the state. You know, you read these stories about, you know, various forms of police misconduct and well, you don't it doesn't take very much imagination. You think, you know, why is it that so one question is what's going on with these agents? What's going on with these cops that, you know, shoot people in their beds? Something has gone wrong. There's something wrong with the rest of us that we're willing to put up with that and think, well, gosh, I guess, you know, if the police do it, it's okay or something. And I think it's because to some extent anyway, it's because we've gotten blinded by this focus on we need the institution, you know, we believe that we need police, we need law and order. So there's this macro level story about the society that we live in. And now we see the particular officers as playing roles in that. And we've lost sight of what it is either for them to be just or at the very least to treat others, you know, some way that's comforting with justice in their relations with other individuals. And so I think that's exactly right that there's a lost perspective. That's really quite problematic. So you've certainly given us a huge amount to think about. So thank you for that. And I'm more good reasons to hate puppy side. So for listeners who then want to explore these topics more, can you point us in the right direction? Sure. Fortunately or unfortunately, most of the pointing probably has to be to my own work. I think that I'm kind of swimming upstream here against the current of a lot of work in modern moral and social philosophy. And I don't mean to say that it's unfortunate that people are really thinking about just societies. But I think there's something lost. And the toehold that I've tried to get, I think is this angle on thinking about virtue, thinking about seeing others as reason giving in a way that doesn't run through the story about the state or institutions. The book that I published last year is The Value of Living Well is the main place. This article that we've been talking about is another. I have an article in a collection by Dan Russell. The article is called Virtue and Politics. It's a Cambridge companion to virtue ethics where I'm making related points. But mostly this is a research program. So in this particular paper, I'm sort of floating the problem that I think in all honesty, I think it's really Nozick's problem. I think Nozick was worried about this and he was right to be worried about it. I think he ran out. He wasn't in position to say very much more about it. I've wanted to develop a moral theory that could put us or a theory really of rationality, practical rationality and making sense of the reasons that we have for seeing others in certain ways, treating them in certain ways. And the book is really setting the foundation for that. So I hope to be doing more right now. That's about all I can, that's about the best I could suggest. Thank you for listening to Free Thoughts. If you have any questions or comments about today's show, you can find us on Twitter at Free Thoughts Pod. That's Free Thoughts P-O-D. Free Thoughts is a project of Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute and is produced by Evan Banks. To learn more about Libertarianism, visit us on the web at www.libertarianism.org.