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George Grant's Justice*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2010

David Gauthier
David Gauthier
Affiliation:
University of Pittsburgh
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Extract

In 1974, George Grant delivered the Josiah Wood lectures at Mount Allison University on the theme English-Speaking Justice. The lectures, first published in 1978, have been republished, and a volume of later essays on somewhat related themes has recently appeared. Grant's work offers an impressionistic but deep challenge to the conception of justice in modern moral thought and practice, a challenge paralleled, in interesting and important ways, by concerns about morality raised in the writings of such persons as Alasdair MacIntyre, Bernard Williams, and, perhaps more surprisingly, J. L. Mackie. In this review, I want briefly to expound Grant's treatment of justice, to exhibit its relationships to other disquieting accounts, and to suggest some of the resources available to contractarian moral theory for lightening what for Grant is a terrifying darkness.

Type
Critical Notices/Etudes Critiques
Information
Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 27 , Issue 1 , Spring 1988 , pp. 121 - 134
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1988

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References

1 Grant, George, English-Speaking Justice (Toronto: Anansi, 1985), pp. xi, 104Google Scholar; Technology & Justice (Toronto: Anansi, 1986), pp. 133Google Scholar. References to the former are indicated simply by page numbers, to the latter by T & J.

2 Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971)Google Scholar. References to this work are identified by 77.

3 We need to exercise care in relating Nietzsche to contractarianism. I suggest that for Grant the appropriate relation must be this: Nietzsche says, “Impose your will where you can”; contractarianism says, “Agree, and so curb your will, where you must”. So understood, each expresses one side of Glaucon's account of justice which Socrates seeks to refute in the Republic. Both see “quality of life”as determined only by the subjective, individual will. If, however, Nietzsche thought that the powerful will was superior, and did not mean by this only that greater power was the means to fuller realization of subjective goals, then his account of value, and of justice, departs less from the ancient account than Grant supposes, substituting a different answer to the question of what is due to human beings, rather than rejecting the question. But even had I the space, I lack the competence to enter further into the interpretation of Nietzsche.

4 Rawls, John, “Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical”, Philosophy & Public Affairs 14/3 (1985), 237nGoogle Scholar. Subsequent references to this paper are identified by JF: PM.

5 Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan (London: 1651), chap. 10.Google Scholar

6 Maclntyre, Alasdair, After Virtue (2d ed.; Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 2Google Scholar. Subsequent references to this work are identified by AV.

7 Mackie, J. L., Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1977), 15Google Scholar. Subsequent references to this work are identified by E: IRW.

8 Williams, Bernard, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 197Google Scholar. Subsequent references to this work are identified by ELP.

9 Rorty, Richard, “Method and Morality”, in Haan, Norma, Bellah, Robert N., Rabinow, Paul and Sullivan, William M., eds., Social Science as Moral Inquiry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 174Google Scholar. Subsequent references to this paper are identified by MM.

10 Gauthier, David, Morals by Agreement (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986).Google Scholar

11 Hume, David, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (London: 1751), §3.CrossRefGoogle Scholar