사회주의 정의론에 관한 윤리적 연구

Abstract

This paper attempts to examine the socialist theory of justice. The socialist critique of justice requires us to raise the issue of whether justice has a distinctive meaning beyond conformity to established rules and practices and, if so, if this can be distinguished from and related to other social and political ideals. Consideration of the socialist approach to justice is therefore an appropriate entree to the study of issues in recent political philosophy of justice. Marx's contention is that rights and justice are essentially bourgeois ideas which impress the ideology of capitalist economic organization. His radically different starting point implies that a socialist theory of justice must differ from liberal theories not only in the content of its principles but also in the function which it allots to justice discourse. The differing analyses of the socialist concept of justice which have been put forward can usefully be approached in terms of the contrast between formal and material justice, the justice of adherence to rules as distinct from the justice of the rules themselves. It might appear that law is an intrinsically capitalist phenomenon, and one which will play no significant part within a truly socialist society. Marx's views on justice and rights rejected the idea that juridical conceptions are the most fundamental conceptions for explaining social phenomena. This rejection of the juridical model is, of course, an inference from Marx's materialist views on the relation between the base and the superstructure of a given society. For Marx, an analysis of the basic productive forces and productive processes of a society, rather than its conceptions of justice and rights and the juridical institutions that embody them, provides the key to understanding that society as a whole. Because he believes that these basic productive forces and processes are the real foundation on which rises a legal and political superstructure and which determine the general character of the social, political, and intellectual life process of a society. He concludes that juridical conceptions of justice and rights play neither a major explanatory nor a major critical role. He is committed to a very radical position on the state and social justice. I argue that this radical evaluative perspective is more epistemological than moral in any traditional sense. But, in spite of its deficiencies, Marx's critique of juridical concepts is of great theoretical and practical importance. Though some of his criticisms are based in part on dubious and unexamined assumptions about the sources of conflict and harmony, his work provides a systematic and powerful challenge to the most sacred dogmas of moral and political philosophy in modern societies.