制度的美德及其局限

Justice as the Primary Virtue of Social System

针对罗尔斯《正义论》开篇关于制度正义的论断,麦金太尔和慈继伟两位学者都提出了质疑。本文以此为切入点,探讨正义之为制度美德的实质含义、基本条件和实现过程。作者肯定了麦金太尔关于个人正义美德之于社会制度正义美德所具有的人格(主体)基础意义的观点,也同意慈继伟关于正义之“两面性”的理论分析,但与此同时,作者强调指出,社会制度之正义示范性和普遍约束力对于实现社会制度之正义美德亦有着特别重要、甚至是根本性的意义,而此一意义的实现又有赖于社会固有的政治文化资源和精神道德资源。作者期待以此综合并推进上述各家见解,寻求一种关于制度之正义美德的完整理解。

Against the assertion for the institutional justice presented by John Rawls in the very beginning of his founding book entitled A Theory of Justice, both Professor A. MacIntyre and Mr. Ci Jiwei raised some doubts and criticism. Taking their interrogation as a starting-point, this essay tries to throw some lights over the essential elements, the basic conditions and the processing of justice as an institutional virtue. Approving for both MacIntyre's idea that justice as a personal virtue should take a founding role in the construction of just social system, and for Mr. Ci Jiwei's theoretical analysis of the two faces of justice, the author puts an emphasis on that the exemplification and the universal restriction of social institutional justice sound very special and even fundamental significance for bringing social institutional justice into being, furthermore, if can all these go through just depend on how much political cultural resource and moral resource can be offered by a society. What the author wants to do is nothing more than trying to put the different points of views into a synthetic consideration, so that we can come to have an integral or a comprehensive understanding of justice as the primary virtue of social system.