Justice, ethical dispositions, and liberal socialism

ABSTRACT Social institutions that seek to realize justice must foster the moral disposition to act on the norms of justice. In order to spell out this claim, the paper turns to Hegel’s idea of Sittlichkeit (ethical life). In Hegel’s framework, the institutions of ethical life have the task of nurturing the ‘ethical disposition’, something akin to what Rawls calls the ‘sense of justice’. This task places particular constraints on institutions. The formation of ethical dispositions requires what I call an ‘internal’ transformation of the economic sphere, allowing individuals to develop their moral capacities. This stands in contrast to many theories of distributive justice, including Rawls’s, which treat the market as a ‘black box’, whose main virtue is seen in maximizing economic output. By reconstructing Hegel’s institutional suggestions systematically, it turns out that Hegel’s social philosophy offers convincing arguments for a liberal socialism.