( 170 ) Black Rights/White Wrongsgoes all the way back to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics.^50 Distributive justice
deals with norms and principles for the distribution of goods, rectificatory
justice with norms and principles for the correction of wrongful distribu-
tions. So rectificatory justice is supposed to correct past wrongdoing. In
Rawls’s framework, rectificatory justice (what Rawls calls “compensatory
justice”)^51 falls under non- ideal theory. It is not coextensive with non- ideal
theory, because non- ideal theory also includes such domestic issues as civil
disobedience and conscientious refusal (dealt with in Theory of Justice) and
such international issues as “burdened societies” and “outlaw states” (dealt
with in The Law of Peoples).^52 Over the course of Rawls’s lifetime, his work
was focused almost exclusively on ideal theory (principles of distributive
justice under ideal circumstances), and his brief forays into non- ideal the-
ory were centered on problems other than rectification. There is no discus-
sion of rectificatory justice in Rawls’s work.
Now though one could choose to subsume anti- racial- discrimination
measures under the category of racial justice (as pre- empting racial injus-
tice),^53 racial justice, as I earlier emphasized, is pre- eminently a matter
of rectificatory justice, the correction of the legacy of the past. In a well-
ordered society, one that is regulated by Rawls’s two principles, structural
racial subordination will not exist, nor will the legacy of such subordina-
tion. That is uncontroversial. But the question is how do we get to there
from here? This is the transition problem: what route to take and by
which principles to be guided. And the problem is that Rawls does not
tell us how to travel. His principles of justice are supposed to be principles
of distributive justice for the regulation of an ideal well- ordered society,
not principles of transitional justice to transform an ill- ordered society
into a well- ordered society. In this enterprise, as Rawls himself seems to
concede, the applicability or extensibility of the principles of ideal theory
is limited:
The principles define then a perfectly just scheme; they belong to ideal theory and set
up an aim to guide the course of social reform. But even granting the soundness of these
principles for this purpose, we must still ask how well they apply to institutions under
less than favorable conditions, and whether they provide any guidance for instances of
injustice. The principles and their lexical order were not acknowledged with these situ-
ations in mind and so it is possible that they no longer hold. I shall not attempt to give
a systematic answer to these questions.... The intuitive idea is to split the theory of
justice into two parts. The first or ideal part assumes strict compliance.... My main
concern is with this part of the theory. Nonideal theory, the second part, is worked out
after an ideal conception of justice has been chosen; only then do the parties ask which
principles to adopt under less happy conditions. This division of the theory has, as I have
indicated, two rather different subparts. One consists of the principles for governinghttp://www.ebook3000.com