Sidgwick - Conclusion

This is an ancient rule of justice. It may not cover all cases. It probably doesn't. But it covers a great many, including some of the most important.

This rule may seem empty by itself. It immediately raises questions about what a person is due. But I think we have given a partial answer to this ancient question. We have said that doing justice, or giving each his or her due, involves the following:

Treat equal cases equally and unequal cases unequally
When cases are different, the treatment must be proportionate to the differences.
We cannot decide when cases are equal or which treatment is appropriate without a larger theory of justice. The larger theory must tell us which circumstances are relevant. These might include such aspects as need, merit, desert, productivity, and others.
In some cases, judgments about relevance are moral judgments.
The weight or ordering of the various relevant circumstances must be specified in our larger theory of justice
The injunction to treat equal cases equally is not analytically true, but the claim that justice requires that we treat equal cases equally is analytically true.

A great deal of what we are saying can be summed up in what Fred was saying: that justice stands opposed to arbitrary decisions and actions. But we must also notice what Ayesha was the first to point out: that the connection between justice and non-arbitrary action is intrinsic. It is built into the concept of justice itself.

Having said all that, however, we are still left with a problem. As Vera said, the injunction to treat equal cases equally does not, by itself, have any operational implications. It doesn't tell us what to do. We saw how Perelman and many other philosophers consider it a formal principle. Everything depends on what count as equal cases and what counts as equal or appropriate treatment. The concept of a larger theory of justice is very, very important here. That's why I want us to discuss one of the best known theories, the theory of John Rawls, in our next session.