The Place of Liberty among Other Values (1) - Politics Is Ordering Human Relationships

Image credit.

I have just come across a text in which it is proposed that in The Republic 

Socrates poses what may be the most fundamental of all questions in political philosophy: 'What is justice?'   (p. 3 in G. Gaus, Political Concepts and Political Theories)

It has been a long time since I have read The Republic, leaving me with very little memory of what is argued in it, and I have not yet continued to read the piece by Gerald Gaus from which I take the above quote.

So, I am simply asking myself, as a matter of probing my own "attempts at liberty," my own theory of liberty, what reasons might I be able to advance in defence of the contention that the search for justice is the most basic urge in political reasoning.

Posing this question strikes me as a useful way to get ahead with an issue I have meant to tackle a long time ago: determining the place of liberty among other values.

Apart from being an entertaining pastime, the question who might be the best soccer player ever is hardly a valid research programme. There are, to begin with,  too many incommensurabilities involved in comparing all players in their diverse positions as goalkeeper, defender, midfield player or forward.

Surely, there is no absolute hierarchy of questions in a subject as complex as political philosophy; the pertinence of questions and their ranking are likely to change depending on which issue one is focussing on, which aspects one is interested in learning more about. 

However, for my purpose, it is heuristically efficient to examine what is gained by according justice the place of pre-eminence among other fundamental issues.

My initial answer, then, is: 

Justice may indeed be regarded as the most fundamental issue in political philosophy because - or: if it is felt that - politics is about ordering the relationships among human beings.

If by justice we understand the admissible ordering of relationships among human beings. then the concept does serve a fundamental purpose in thinking about politics.

Thus, we can think of different variants of ordering admissible relationships among human beings, such as embodied in paternal models, where admissibility is determined by paternal decree ("Führer befiehl, wir folgen dir," meaning "Führer command us, we shall follow you."), or egalitarian models, where decrees must be striven for in processes of debate and negotiation that involve numerous equals.

A phrase like 

there is no higher value than freedom

may contain important information, if it is intended to point to the fact that a certain desired order of admissible human relationships cannot persist in the absence of what we call (the conditions of) freedom. 

However, ultimately the statement is a rhetorical exaggeration because an order characterised by the hallmarks of freedom depends on other values than that of freedom alone. 

Even if it were possible to define a timelessly unique and incontestable notion of freedom, which I doubt is feasible, it would always depend for its structural reliability on the inclusion of values other than that of freedom. In other words, freedom is not self-defining, no less than markets are self-creating. 

Counting among the egalitarian models of admissible human relationships, freedom is of necessity negotiable among the constituency that vouchsafes her present condition. Thus, values associated with freedom are not subject to a uniform and unchangeable definition, which is also true for their relative status vis-à-vis one another, i.e. the trade-offs deemed admissible among the values constituting or complementing any set of narrower definientia of freedom.

So: yes, freedom is one of many possible regimes of justice. And as we shall argue in later posts, the basic contours of freedom are capable of enclosing many different regimes of justice.

Also, some of the building blocks of freedom, like a certain set of different applications of the term equality (e.g. characteristics of equality in the political or the legal processes of debate and negotiation), are just as fundamental as the demand for liberty relative to a certain desired ordering of human relationships. If, in your mind, you conjure away or, in practice, remove these building blocks of equality, the tower of freedom collapses.

Continued in The Place of Liberty among Other Values (2) - Between Total Unfreedom and Total Freedom.