Justice and the Real World - Economics Retreat

By Ian Mason

The Waterperry Economics Retreat 2025 convened in the first week of February under the headline ‘Justice and the Real World”. The idea being, to consider what some of the greatest philosophers had to say about justice and consider how their ideas might apply in today’s world. 

Some of the greatest minds in Western Philosophy and some of the greatest economists have explored the idea of justice, viewing it from different perspectives and throwing light on its many different aspects. This is what we found.

For Plato, justice is a state of the soul in which reason prevails by guiding and directing its passionate and hedonistic tendencies. Justice in society is the souls of the citizens writ large in the institutions and conduct of the State.

Aristotle, Plato’s pupil, also saw justice is a virtue, but with a particularly social aspect. He saw it as a mean, a sort of balance, between doing injustice on the one hand and suffering injustice in the other. The famous image of the scales of justice is derived from Aristotle’s thought.

More than a thousand years later, St. Thomas Aquinas, a devotee of Aristotle as well as of Christ, saw justice as the goodness of God expressing itself in human affairs both through personal conduct and in the conduct of affairs of state. As he saw it, both the punishment of an offender and an act of clemency are expressions of the same goodness of God.

Adam Smith, the eighteenth century philosopher and economist, thought that justice is founded in beneficence and shows itself as just conduct that does not merely command approbation, or approval, but which, to an impartial observer, ought to command approbation. Its essential characteristic is that it does not cause harm or injury.

Later, in the nineteenth century, the American economist, Henry George, saw justice as a state of society in which either all the bounty of nature, that is, land, is available to everyone, or at least, where those who possess or own land and the access it gives to nature’s bounty, give full compensation to the community whose presence and efforts give land its monetary value, so that there is no place for poverty or deprivation. He saw in such economic justice the possibility for the full flourishing of the human spirit.

The towering figure of the twentieth century on the topic, although little known outside philosophic circles, was John Rawls. He saw justice as that perfection of social institutions such as free markets, free trade, free elections and free speech and so on, which maximises a sort of qualified liberty in which the disadvantaged are given necessary assistance to overcome their disadvantages so that justice is fairness of opportunity. It could be said that he crystallised the thinking behind the libertarian economics that characterised the latter part of the twentieth century and is playing itself out even now.

Responding to John Rawls, Nobel prize-winner Amartya Sen, argued that, important as the institutions are, it is more important to relieve manifest injustices than to seek some ideal perfection of justice or just institutions. In his view, justice is to ensure that people have the capability to lead well-informed lives of their own choosing without coercion, oppression, or deprivation.

It should be stressed that all has just been said is one person’s very brief summary of the thought of some great and profound thinkers to whom it is impossible to do justice in a couple of sentences, but it may help as a guide.

So what about the real world. Everyone, of course, has their own view about the state of the world, and their own priorities, so when looking for manifest injustices, there was no difficulty in coming up with a list which will be fairly familiar to anyone who has thought about it. There are probably four main headings in no particular order. The first centred around the commodification of both people and nature on the basis that everything has a price and should go to the highest bidder. There was concern about inequality both in access to economic resources and in the distribution of wealth. This is compounded by a sense that power, both political and economic, is being abused and that institutions for the restraint of power are becoming increasingly weak and fragmented. 

All this leads to a prevailing sense of insecurity in which people instinctively focus, or seem to focus, on looking after their own interests without too much regard to anything else. People, as it were, become greedy for security and the economic system begins to break down.

This rather gloomy picture was balanced by the fact that none of those present recognised themselves in it. No doubt there is greed and corruption in the world, but it is balanced by the fact that most people are much better than that. Most people in fact engage in family or household life in a spirit of generosity and care for others. Most people try to live honestly and decently even where society and its institutions seem to be telling them to have regard only to their own interests. 

All of the philosophers mentioned so far addressed the subject in the context of Western philosophy with its emphasis on logic and rationality. By contrast we also looked at the thought of the two Teachers of the Philosophy of Non-Duality, called Shankarcharyas, upon whom we rely in the School. Maharaja Sri Shantananda Sarasvati said simply: “Love is knowledge and laws of nature that works as justice”, and justice implies knowledge, happiness, health and freedom for everyone. For Maharaja Sri Vasudevananda Saraswati, justice implies freedom and prosperity for everyone. For both, these are expressions of a Divine will or intention for humanity and the universe but it takes a deliberate effort for them to manifest in human affairs.

One participant in the conference summed it up afterwards. He wrote:
“Reflecting on the study, I’m struck by how each thinker wrestled with the same fundamental question: how to structure society so that justice is not merely an abstract ideal but a lived reality. Life seems to be growing ever more complex, with technology permeating nearly every aspect of our existence. From the way we work and communicate to how we access information and make decisions, our relationship with technology is redefining social structures and power dynamics. As innovation accelerates, I believe justice will be critical in ensuring that we strive to harness technology as a tool for human flourishing rather than becoming subservient to it. The tensions between power, access, and fairness that those past philosophers explored seem more relevant than ever in this digital age.”

That was the other thing that emerged from our discussions. Somehow or other, everyone does have a philosophy of life. It is imbibed from our families, our societies, our films, literature, music and cultural background, and it sits in our innermost thoughts and attitudes shaping the way we lead our lives and shape our societies. The more we think about these things and bring them into the light of day, the more likely we are to be able to build societies that deliver the kind of ideals that the Shankarcharyas and the great philosophers speak about, or at least something closer to them.

Ian Mason
Retreat Leader
February 2025