Abstract
In any complex human society, distinct persons may have strikingly different standards of living. Those who lead the most undesirable, poorest lives in society can be called the worst off. Given that we almost always do not want to be, but some have to be, the worst off, we may want to find a right way to treat the worst off. In the West, John Rawls has proposed a conception of justice as fairness, and in the East, Confucius and Mencius have developed conceptions of ren (humaneness) and yi (righteousness) partly in order to deal with social injustice in the distribution of benefits and the problem of the worst off. Their conceptions and proposed solutions provide valuable ideas, which through comparison may be better assessed and then employed, or even combined, to address the problem. In this essay, I try to examine and compare their conceptions of distributive justice and the worst off, and then expound their suggested solutions to the problem and propose a provisional answer on the basis of those ideas.
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Notes
This question is distinct from the former question, and both are substantive questions. But this question seems more specific, so I want to concentrate on it here.
I cite the revised edition (Rawls, 1999) of A Theory of Justice rather than the original (1971) edition because Rawls believes that the revised edition includes “significant improvements” on the original edition (1999, p. xi).
“Yi” is a central term in Confucianism, which may be roughly equated with “righteous (righteousness)” or “right (rightness)” in English.
“Ren” is another central term in Confucianism—it may be roughly equated with “humane (humaneness/humanity)”, “benevolent (benevolence)”, or “good (goodness)” in English.
I basically agree with Yang Bojun’s interpretation (楊, 1980, p. 38) of this passage and have incorporated it here.
This is Arthur Waley’s accurate interpretation of 讓 (yielding or humility), see Analects (1989), p. 104, footnote 6.
Of course, “gentlemen” or “lesser men” refers to both males and females here.
For a very helpful discussion of the utopian and realistic features of political theory, see Nagel (1989, pp. 903–905).
My sketch may be different from Rawls’s (non-existent) nonideal answer to the question, but is still Rawlsian in spirit.
This is in a way comparable to what Rawls’s “principle of fairness” requires of members of a perfectly just society: “We are not to gain from the cooperative labors of others without doing our fair share” (1999, p. 96).
References
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Nagel, Thomas. (1973). Rawls on Justice. Philosophical Review, 82(2), 220–234.
Nagel, Thomas. (1989). What Makes a Political Theory Utopian? Social Research, 56(4), 903–920.
Rawls, John. (1975). Fairness to Goodness. Philosophical Review, 84(4), 536–554.
Rawls, John. (1999). A Theory of Justice, rev. ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Rawls, John. (2001). Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, ed. Erin Kelly. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
The Analects of Confucius (1989). Trans. Arthur Waley. New York: Vintage Book.
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The writing of this article was supported by a grant from the National Social Science Fund of China (Grant No. 19BZX013).
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Jin, H. Rawlsian and Confucian Distributive Justice and the Worst Off. Philosophia 50, 1895–1912 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-022-00486-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-022-00486-z