I am grateful to Daniel Weinstock for his generous and insightful review of Public Philosophy in a New Key. He concludes with an important question:
There is a lack of fit between this [Tully’s] indignation and Tully’s view that there are no standards of justice that are independent of historically contingent language-games … Aren’t judgements about the horrific treatment visited upon the planet’s most vulnerable peoples actually fuelled by a sense of what justice requires, rather than by what justice happens to mean in this or that language game?
The question makes it appear that, when individuals or groups raise a claim of justice, they are doing something more than raising a claim in a language game. I wonder if this distinction can be sustained once we understand the meaning of a language game.
First, a language game comprises both the language (the relations of communication and knowledge) and the game (the activities and power relations) in which a claim of justice or injustice irrupts. It is the whole practice in which any agent, by means of an act of “civic freedom,” makes a justice claim. Next, a claim is taken up and tested for its validity in more specific language games of critical testing and justification. These claims-testing practices are multiple. They include courts, legislatures, tribunals, dispute resolution practices, truth and reconciliation commissions, investigative journalism, freedom of information, official and counter public spheres, protests, Satyagraha, revolts, academic justice-testing practices from Plato to Sen and everyday conversations. Third, within any testing practice there is the critical freedom of the participants to call its standards into question and subject them to critical scrutiny, thereby modifying and improving the practice en passant. Hence, to say that a justice claim is valid relative to the language games available to test it means that it can survive the best available testing practices and critical reflection on their standards.
The pragmatist tradition argues that this is the best way to think of justice claims. It orients us to the multiplicity of existing testing practices as the grounds of a claim. It thereby refuses to stop at a formulation of a claim that exempts it from testing by presenting it as beyond question (as a self-evident truth, unmediated word of an authority, universal, necessary or without alternatives). Yet it also makes us aware that the practices which give claims their degrees of validity are not transcendental but only the best possible ones here and now. History teaches us that these often turn out to be less than perfect when put to the test of critical freedom.
These features of justice and justification may appear too humble for those who require justice claims to be beyond question. But we could reply that such a requirement is politically dangerous. Rather, it is justice itself that requires us to take up this Socratic testing ethos to claims and counter-claims. It is the basis of a just world.
