The world is in a truly remarkable place. Extreme poverty is falling, with both the absolute number and proportion of people living on $5.50 or less a day the lowest it’s been in at least three decades. Diseases are being fought and conquered. Two dollars is all it takes to protect two people from malaria for three years. What would’ve been an indulgent luxury to the rich 50 years ago is commonplace to increasingly many today, and useful technology that would’ve been unimaginable not long ago is now omnipresent. War has never gone away, but it has been decades since World War II and the structures which were built to keep such an event from ever happening again have been strikingly resilient.
Many in the neoliberal-sphere and its adjacent communities are jealous of these gains, and rightfully so. We live in an age of miracles, and miracles can never be taken for granted. The institutions, philosophies, politics, economics, and technologies which interweave to uphold a baroque miracle which created never-before-heard of prosperity and eliminated suffering on a monumental scale warrant respect and care. Not only must they be handled with care for fear of regression, but also because it would be repugnant to turn down an opportunity to uplift the less fortunate.
This much is true. But in their very justified defense and appreciation of such a miracle, some fail to realize that justice is not a matter of miracles. It would certainly be unjust to choose an economic structure which increases deprivation over one which would decrease it, but that is only part of the equation. Neoliberals often leave the rest of the question under-developed, if developed at all. When they do present a theory of justice, it is often simply copied pre-1974 developments in the liberal tradition. A contemporary liberal revival needs to be as up-to-date in its theory of justice as it is on its economics.
A good place to start with a neoliberal theory of justice is Iris Marion Young’s theory of justice put forward in Justice and the Politics of Difference. This is not an intuitive place to start, for a few reasons. For one, Young was a socialist; for another, it was published in 1990. For our purposes, Charles Wade Mills’ 2017 book Black Rights/White Wrongs would seem more fitting on all fronts. However, there are four reasons why I think it is better to start with Young. First, Young’s theory of justice is more clearly defined, which makes it a more useful foundation. It is easy to modify as needed. Second, Young’s theory of justice is similar to Mills’ in significant ways; as he told me when I contacted him late 2020 to ask him about his relation to Young, they were both engaging in a non-ideal theory of justice with an interest in bringing social oppression to the forefront of justice theorizing. While Mills is more relevant to liberalism and current concerns, Young’s theory is general and clear enough to form a more useful foundation. Mills’ ideas can comfortably modify and rest on top of Young’s. Third, it provides a more fleshed out version of the capabilities approach, which is very popular among theoretically-inclined neoliberals. Fourth, she clearly and explicitly justifies why it is necessary to go beyond wealth to consider social oppression in a theory of justice.
It is for these reasons that I will present Young’s theory of justice as a starting point for neoliberals looking to go beyond pure economics in determining what a well-ordered state looks like.
There is reason to be hesitant about putting social oppression front-and-center in a theory of justice tailored for neoliberals. Material wealth is easy to observe and define, and to think that there is more to justice is to say that there might be moments where justice demands that we all be materially worse off.
The question I would pose is this: In the liberal system, what is the point of money? What is the point of wealth? What is the point of consumption? The value of money and wealth is that it allows the individual to act upon their desires in a way that can potentially be pro-social, and consumption is an expression of those desires. This viewpoint prompts two considerations. First, individuals need liberty in order to actually express and act upon their desires. Second, they need to develop a robust sense of their individual desires, or else they will merely reflect the desires of others around them, rendering any liberty they are given moot.
This forms an argument for the capabilities approach attributed to Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen. In their perspective, a primary aim of politics should be to cultivate individuals’ capabilities to their fullest extent. To this, I would add a key clarification by Young: If people have absolutely no say in the conditions of their actions, then their capabilities will surely be stunted. Democracy becomes a key condition for liberal justice.
The two things which stunt people’s abilities to determine their own actions and the conditions of their actions are domination and oppression, in Young’s account. Domination is the straightforward refusal to let people determine their own actions and participate in determining the conditions of their actions. Oppression is more nuanced, striking at things that people, as people, wish to do. Young famously identifies five faces of oppression:
Exploitation: Systematic and unreciprocated extraction of the fruits of someone’s labor
Marginalization: Exclusion from society
Powerlessness: “Inhibition of the development of one’s capacities” and a “lack of decisionmaking power in one’s working life” (p. 58)
Cultural Imperialism: Inhibition in one’s ability to self-express
Violence
One can quibble with the inclusion of particular faces, their definitions, and if there is redundancy in her categorization. For example, it seems there is significant overlap between her definitions of domination and the first three faces of oppression. Nevertheless, they are useful in demonstrating the injustice of particular social arrangements.
It might be tempting to say that with enough wealth, or an equitable enough distribution of wealth, all of the above injustices fade substantially. This may be true, but wealth is also used to limit the power of those who wish to change social arrangements. Young lists three specific examples of where this happened. First, there was the urban Black liberation movement, where select Black leaders were moved into positions of power and wealth within the existing system, fracturing the movement. Second, there was the neighborhood movement in the Mission district of San Francisco, where they attempted to change the way neighborhoods were developed, but were merely given a say in determining the distribution of resources to neighborhoods. Third, there was the New Populism movement, in which white Americans pushed the ideals of local control against national trends against segregation, which eventually was collapsed into Republican leadership. In each case, morsels of wealth and power were handed out to movements which attempted institutional change, and this was fairly successful and containing the movements, at least for the time being.
It takes jumping through hoops to come up with a definition of justice where the distribution of wealth determines justice, while seven fairly simple categories (domination, oppression, and the five faces of oppression) cover nearly every case of injustice one can think of. From this platform we can comfortably move to contemporary theorists, such as the aforementioned Charles Wade Mills, where we can define and justify things relevant to pressing issues, like Black radical liberalism, with a coherent theory of justice without ever losing sight of the miracles of modern-day capitalism.