Toward a Constitution of Justice Forum based on the Participation of Minjung

Who are the people who are summoned to discuss what justice is, and how it can be realized? This question has a variety of answers depending on the perspective and the position of the people who ask it. In the history of the concept of justice we can scarcely find any designs of justice from the perspective of minjung. Since Plato and Aristotle the concept of justice has been designed to maintain order and peace in the commonwealth and a conservative conception has shaped the mainstream of this tradition. Nowadays, some have attempted to discuss justice from the bottom, but such discourses have not attracted much attention. Therefore, I think one of the most important issues in the contemporary theory of justice is the question of how a justice forum should be constituted on the basis of minjung’s participation. With such a question in mind, I explore first what it means to look through the eyes of minjung. What looks normal in the view of the people who have vested interests can be seen as turned upside down in the eyes of minjung. If we want to see the world from their viewpoints, we must first hear what they say. Second, I investigate the context in which the concept of justice emerged and developed itself in minjung traditions of the Bible and explore some theological clues for designing justice from the perspective of minjung. I pay attention to the observation that the saving and liberating acts of God started from hearing the voices of the dispossessed, the poor and oppressed - the “little people.”In hearing them God decided to stand on their side and judged the systems and structures in which their rights were infringed and which deprived them of opportunities to live in dignity. He evoked in these people the imagination for an alternative world and assigned them to the subjects to shape it. In such procedures the justice of God was realized. Third, I analyze representative theories of justice in Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Machiavelli, Kant, Habermas, Rawls, M. J. Sandel, etc., to point out the problem that there has been no place for minjung in traditional and modern theories of justice. I gain some insights from the discussions of Iris M. Young and N. Fraser on justice and suggest some considerations regarding the constitution of justice forum based on participation of minjung. One is that all the people subjected to and influenced by decision making on membership, representative power, status, wealth, education, health, social fellowship and the like should participate in decision making processes and speak for themselves. I define this as the principle of equal participation. Another solution is to start from the point that each person belongs to a certain social group, and that social groups are differentiated due to continuous and systematic relations among people, that is, social structures. Social and political discourses can be public only under the conditions that the differentiated voices of the oppressed, the marginalized and the excluded are inclusively heard. Here I would like to speak of the principle of differentiation.