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Jiwei Ci, The Two Faces of Justice.

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Jiwei Ci, The Two Faces of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006), xii + 253 pp.

This is a superb philosophical essay. It is elegantly written, imaginative, surprising in ways both large and small, carefully thought through, and embedded in generous readings of other work on justice. It is also deep in many respects---deep in the sense that it regularly uncovers unfamiliar connections between familiar ideas, and brings those connections into focus as central features of the theory and practice of justice.

The two faces problem: conditional motivation and unconditional commitment

The book is not intended to be a novel theory of justice, or a comprehensive treatise on the subject. It is rather a carefully structured and persistently pursued meditation on the connection between justice and reciprocity, as well as on the moral psychology that defines both a central problem for a theory of justice, and the all-too-human limits of the problem' s resolution.

The central problem that Ci points to is an apparent contradiction-one that has implications for the conception of justice, the justification of its norms, and the possibility for developing a stable disposition to follow those norms. He says:

As its title indicates, the main argument of the book is that justice has two "faces": the conditionality of interest and the unconditionality of morality. By the conditional face of justice I mean that the disposition to be just includes the willingness to follow certain norms, as defined in a given conception of justice, provided that other members of the relevant group act likewise. This conditional willingness reflects a principal aim of justice, namely, the reciprocal satisfaction of interests. It distinguishes justice from unconditional virtues [e.g. benevolence] on the one hand and from (rational) egoism on the other. But justice also has another face. Since no system of justice can rest securely on the basis of a general understanding of justice in terms of conditional motives and imperatives, the institution of justice exists to remove conditionality from the human willingness to be just, and thereby to counteract the otherwise contagious nature of breaches of justice. This means that justice has to be sustained through the social creation of unconditional imperatives and of a corresponding unconditional virtue of justice. (5)

The tasks Ci sets for himself here are difficult ones. For one thing, he obviously needs to persuade people who reject mutual advantage accounts of justice that they...

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