Systemic domination as ground of justice
| Author | Tamara Jugov |
| DOI | 10.1177/1474885117690905 |
| Published date | 01 January 2020 |
| Date | 01 January 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
European Journal of Political Theory
2020, Vol. 19(1) 47–66
!The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/1474885117690905
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Article
Systemic domination
as ground of justice
Tamara Jugov
Free University of Berlin, Germany
Abstract
This paper develops a domination-based practice-dependent approach to justice,
according to which it is practices of systemic domination which can be said to
ground demands from justice. The domination-based approach developed overcomes
the two most important objections levelled to alternative practice-dependent
approaches. First, it eschews conservative implications and hence is immune to the
status quo objection. Second, it is immune to the redundancy objection, which
doubts whether empirical facts and practices can really play an irreducible role in ground-
ing justice. In theorising dominating practices in terms of practices of social power, a
domination-based approach makes justice dependent on factual information in three
ways: First, the principle of non-domination is indeterminate and can only be spelled out
by taking into view particular contexts of domination. Second, the principle of non-
domination is conditional on the existence of practices of social power. Third, social
power possesses a structural ontology – to know whether A has social power over B
we need to turn to social rules distributing agents’ higher order status of normative
authority towards each other. This explains in what way practices of social power – and
of domination – are both factual and normative practices and hence how such practices
are non-redundant in grounding justice.
Keywords
Grounds of justice, justice, power, practice dependence, systemic domination
Introduction
1
This paper defends a domination-based practice-dependent approach to justice. It
claims that problems of justice proper only arise where relations of systemic dom-
ination are in place. Even if relations of systemic domination are likely to obtain
wherever humans coexist in limited space over a certain span of time, the claim that
demands and duties of justice depend on the prior existence of relations of
Corresponding author:
Tamara Jugov, Centre for Advanced Studies ‘Justitia Amplificata’, Free University Berlin, Thielallee 43, Berlin
14195, Germany.
Email: Tamara.Jugov@fu-berlin.de
domination is far from trivial. First, it allows us to distinguish the concept of justice
from related moral concepts and thereby offers a principled way of distinguishing
duties of justice from other moral duties. Second, this approach yields a decidedly
‘political’ conception of justice, in the sense that it locates the question of how to
justify relationships of power – and not the question of how to distribute goods – at
the conceptual heart of social justice (Forst, 2013: 17).
This paper engages with the question of justice’s grounds. Which features of a
situation make it the case that it can be assessed in terms of either justice or
injustice? The question of grounds asks for deeper reasons accounting for why
one might hold that duties of justice only connect some persons (e.g. those living
together in a state) but not others (e.g. those who do not share interaction in any
particular practice). While it seems uncontroversial that certain moral duties – for
example ‘thou shall not kill’ – hold categorically and do apply to persons uncon-
nected by common practices, practice-dependent approaches to justice have
argued that demands and duties of justice only exist where certain practices are
already in place. More specifically, practice-dependent theorists hold that prac-
tical human practices form a necessary condition (Abizadeh, 2007: 3–4; Ronzoni,
2009: 232; Andrea Sangiovanni, 2012a: 83) – or, on a stronger interpretation,
which I will endorse in this paper, a necessary and sufficient condition
2
– for
demands of justice to arise. Sangiovanni characterises such positions in his ‘prac-
tice-dependence thesis’(2008: 147): practice-dependent theorists accept that justice
is grounded in some normative principles P, yet they also hold that ‘reasons for
endorsing first principles of justice for which P is a premise (call them J1, J2 ...,
Jn) cannot be derived from P alone’ (2008: 147). According to such views, a
conception of justice – comprised of what Rawls has called ‘first principles of
justice’(1999: 8–9) or of what G.A. Cohen referred to as ‘fundamental principles
of justice’ – which he contrasts with rules of regulation – (2008: 276), cannot be
grounded solely in normative principles P however, a concept of justice might be
grounded solely in such principles. Instead, on the practice-dependent account
first or fundamental principles of justice must be equally grounded in empirical
facts concerning human practices.
Talk of ‘grounding’ principles of justice does not mean that factual practices will
be sufficient in justifying normative demands.
3
The normative premise(s) P will
obviously also play a vital role in justifying any first principles of justice. An
empirical ground cannot make a normative proposition true by itself. However,
practice-dependent approaches hold that practices’ role in ‘grounding’ principles of
justice must mean more than to simply ‘trigger’ or ‘activate’ pre-existing duties of
justice. Accordingly, my suggestion is to understand the reference to ‘grounds’
precisely in terms of a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of prob-
lems and duties of justice: without it, such problems and duties do not exist. Note
that this is also a much stronger claim than simply concurring with Rawls on the
‘objective circumstances of justice’(1999: 109ff.). Most – though not all (Cohen,
2008) – practice-independent theorists agree that problems of justice will only arise
where certain empirical facts about human agents or the world, in general, hold
true (Caney, 2008; Goodin, 1988).
48 European Journal of Political Theory 19(1)
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