Discrimination as injustice

Reasons of justice are reasons for or against altering someone's relative position. The word 'relative' is of the essence here. One may have reasons to alter someone's position which do not make any essential reference to anyone else's position. For example, the fact that a prisoner is being tortured is reason enough by itself to write letters of protest, with the aim of improving the prisoner's treatment. Torture is inhumane. But isn't torture also unjust? Doesn't one also have a reason of justice to protest? Perhaps. As part of one's protest, one might relate the position of the torture victim to the position of other people (other prisoners, people of different political views, the torturers themselves, the torture victim's victims, the government, etc). In that case one may be trying to give a reason of justice for the torture to desist. It may buttress the reason of humanity. But of course it may also fail to do so. The authorities inflicting the torture may accurately reply, in some cases, that they are inflicting it with impeccable justice. Yet still, on grounds of its inhumanity, the torture should cease, and the protests should go on if it does not. This kind of example should give considerable pause for thought to those who suppose, with John Rawls, that 'justice is the first virtue of social institutions'.' The justice of their social institutions may provide little consolation to those who live under brutal, cowardly, dishonest, intolerant, or ungenerous regimes. And yet we might be tempted to accept, for all that, that justice could be the first virtue of some social institutions. In particular, there are grounds for supposing that justice has a special link with adjudication, such that, while legislators, bureaucrats and government officials ought to be just inter alia, courts ought to be just above all. The idea is captured in the familiar proposal that the role of the courts lies in 'the administration of justice'. At its most basic, this special association between courts and justice comes of the fact that, in court, there can normally be no winners without losers. Whatever the court decides, what is at stake is the relative position of the parties. Thus the reasons which the court has for its decisions, whatever else they may include, must include reasons for or