Introduction

This chapter divides into two main parts. The first part will examine Wittgenstein’s relevance to problems concerning justice insofar as his philosophy involves getting clear about concepts. Wittgenstein's philosophical remarks could help us to get to grips with philosophical problems about justice by helping us to get clear about the concept of justice and thereby aiding our understanding. The second part of the chapter moves beyond concerns with getting clear about the concept of justice and asks whether Wittgensteinians have reason to criticize particular conceptions or theories of justice that are currently in circulation and whether Wittgensteinians should favour particular conceptions or theories of justice, before finally discussing some ways in which tools from Wittgenstein's later work might help us to understand and overcome injustices.

Getting Clear about the Concept of Justice

It is possible that the texts of past philosophers might help us to resolve conceptual problems about justice. However, there are various problems with this. One problem is that some past philosophers wrote in languages other than our own and the translations that we have of their work might obscure the fact that they employed different concepts to us. For example, Hanna Pitkin points out that the ancient Greeks used the word dike and had no equivalent to our word ‘justice’. Dike ‘came to mean “justice” and to measure the rightness of human action’ but it ‘originally meant simply “the way”: a descriptive account of how things in fact were, or were done’.

It was dike or dikaiosyne that Plato wrote about in The Republic. The words are usually translated as ‘justice’ in English translations of Plato's work but according to the translator Ernest Barker that is not a very good translation. The Greek word dike, according to Barker, ‘includes the ethical notions (or some of the ethical notions) which belong to our word “righteousness” ‘ and Pitkin thinks that if we get a better sense of what the Greek expression means then some of Plato's claims become more plausible. For example, whereas it strikes us as odd to say that justice is the ‘master virtue’, encompassing all other virtues, we can at least see where someone like Plato is coming from if they say that righteousness is the ‘master virtue’, containing all others.