According to Jiwei Ci, The Two Faces of Justice (TFJ) is based on the following empirical observation: “if someone’s unjust acts were not refrained or punished, then others who desire justice would imitate those unjust persons’ to some extent, and the unjust acts would overrun the whole society” (1). I am sure that this observation is not at all uncommon, as David Hume also said that “the same happiness, raised by the social virtue of justice and its subdivisions, may be compared to the building of a vault, where each individual stone would, of itself, fall to the ground; nor is the whole fabric supported but by the mutual assistance and combination of its corresponding parts”(An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. by Tom L. Beauchamp, Oxford University Press, 1998: 171). However, Hume, like most moral philosophers, didn’t further ask why each individual stone would of itself fall to the ground, and how those corresponding parts mutually assist and combine. Ci incisively emphasizes the theoretical importance behind those phenomena, and summarizes it as “the easy circulation of the unjust acts,” or in another words, “the fragility of the just acts”. Ci believes that a good start for us is to pursue the characters, especially the psychological ones, of justice.

Ci argues that there are two faces of justice: on the one hand, as a rule of interest exchange, justice is conditional; on the other hand, as a moral imperative, it is unconditional. As far as we know, the central questions of modern theories of justice have much to do with the normative content of justice and its foundations. By contrast, Ci’s book is an attempt to study the so-called “just disposition” which is independent of any normative theories of justice, and therefore this book is perhaps the first systematic treatise on this subject. Although his focus is to offer a unique perspective on moral psychology, Ci has nevertheless immersed himself in the long line of Western moral traditions from Kant to the present, drawing on many useful theoretical resources such as Kant, Hume, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, John Rawls, Jürgen Habermas, Brian Barry, Allan Gibbard, etc., to construct his own theoretical model of justice.

There are two aspects of “just disposition”: one is about substantive norms of justice, while the other is about its structural character. The former means “those conceptions about right and wrong, i.e., the so-called senses of justice, derived from the just norms which belong to the societies in which we live and always vary from time to time and place to place” (3). The latter refers to the structural character of justice that never changes with the changing norms of justice. Ci emphasizes that although the structural character is not a priori, it is shared by all just persons from different social-historical circumstances. In a narrow sense adopted by TFJ, just disposition refers only to the structural character not to substantive norms.

Ci also places this just disposition in the narrow-sense on a par with “abstract” and “general” just disposition, and asserts that “just disposition has some general characteristics which are stable and transcendent of all particular social-historical circumstances” (4). Ci admits that this proposition is the first supposition of TFJ, the rationalization of which is open to criticism. The second supposition that props up TFJ is that “the explanatory theory of just disposition could be independent of the normative theories of justice”. If one agrees with these two suppositions, one may find cogent the following two main issues of TFJ: First, how can conditional aspects of justice coexist with its unconditional aspects? Second, as the product of integration of these two aspects of justice, what is the basic character of just disposition?

Here are the two key concepts of TFJ: “reciprocity” and “socialization.” Through the concept of reciprocity, Ci purports to explain the motive of justice, or the reason that justice is conditional. The term “reciprocity,” according to Ci, indicates peoples’ conditional obedience to reasonable norms. It is the immanent character of just disposition, since reasonable norms would change while reciprocity itself would not. A dilemma that contemporary moral theories have to face is that, although we agree on the autonomous status of the basis of our moral reflection and action, we disagree profoundly on what that basis is: we can neither, like Kant, ground morality in our a priori practical reason without any regard to natural or empirical motives; nor can we, like Hume, ground morality in our affective rather than rational nature. Rawls insists that we need an “Archimedean point” from which to assess the structure of society; it seems that a similar thing can be said about just disposition. However, as Michael Sandel points out, the Humean starting point would be arbitrary because contingent, the Kantian one would be arbitrary because groundless (Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, Cambridge University Press, 1998: 17).

On what basis do we need justice and what is the reliable source of our motivation to do justice? From the viewpoint of moral psychology, in Ci’s opinion, the term “reciprocity” provides a possible source of motivation for just acts and is the key concept to explain them. It seems that Ci opts for Hume’s desire-based account of justice rather than Kant’s principle-based account. At the end of chapter 3, after a detailed analysis of the theories of Hume, Buchanan, Rawls, Habermas, etc., Ci distinguishes two levels of understanding concerning circumstances of justice, i.e., Humean objective circumstances and Habermas’s objective circumstances respectively, and correspondingly self-interested justice (based on mutual advantage) and subject-centered justice (based on mutual good will). Since subject-centered justice will be obtained only in a well-ordered society, Ci argues that self-interested justice provides a reliable source of motivation for ordinary people to pursue justice in actual life. There is a diachronic development in which self-interested justice changes into subject-centered justice, as is the case that mutual advantage changes into mutual good will. Though Ci takes mutual advantage, especially the rule of “equal-interest exchange” (also called “the minimal reciprocity” in chapter 1), as the reliable source of motivation for ordinary people to do just acts, he claims, later in chapter 7, that only the reciprocity based on mutual good will fully embodies the spirit of justice (156). In fact this view was popular thousands of years ago, as Plato and Aristotle taught that morality is something that serves to repress and restrict innate selfish tendencies. However, under post-metaphysical circumstances, we have to ask what is the reliable source of motivation for ordinary people to be disposed to return good for a good, i.e., the reciprocity embodying the spirit of justice and based on mutual good will.

According to Ci, it is “socialization” that bridges the gap between mutual advantage and mutual good will. By appeal to socialization, Ci explains how the unconditional aspects of just disposition are possible. There are two paths to unconditional justice: First, through monopolizing the power of punishing unjust acts by society, it is neither possible nor necessary to do personal retaliation, and members of a society thus are required to obey the just norms unconditionally (the “unconditional” here referring to acts but not to motivations). This is also the key to understanding the relation between justice and law; second, through moral education, normative justice will become “categorical imperatives,” and members of a society become confident in the absoluteness of moral imperatives (the “unconditional” here refers to both acts and motivations).

Eventually, Ci asserts that the motivations of just actors are both conditional and moral, this twofold motivation making justice not only possible but also fragile. It is these two concepts, reciprocity and socialization, that combine the two faces of the justice. In a word, Ci’s basic dichotomy is this: on the one hand, conditional justice is personal, motivational, and original; on the other hand, unconditional justice is social-political, institutional, and derivable. Readers of TFJ will be impressed by the continuing and essential theoretical tension between the transcendent and the empirical, between motivations and acts, and between morality and interest.

I will now present two brief criticisms of TFJ. Firstly, it is not always possible to exclude debate on substantive norms from debate on just disposition, and we cannot decide the characteristics of just disposition without talking about certain norms. This seems evident even in some of Ci’s own propositions. For example, Ci says that “any theory of justice is by definition individualism” (57), and that “just disposition has such a minimal normative substance as ‘equal-interest exchange’”(42). The individualist assumption and the teleological foundation of Ci’s theory of justice become quite clear here.

Secondly, the statement that “the disposition of justice is conditional” is unconditional and universal. However, Ci’s justification of this universal proposition is based on empirical observation. Ci’s theory of just disposition thus seems unreliable, as no mere empirical observation can secure the universality of any proposition. Although Ci might respond to my objection by citing Rawls statement that “Moral philosophy must be free to use contingent assumptions and general facts as it pleases”, it still cannot convince me of the universality of the above statement. He would need at least to provide certain relevant sociological or metaphysical arguments to support such an assertion.

Despite these and a couple of other minor problems, I don’t think that they will do any great damage to Ci’s theory in general, as his main work here is moral psychology rather than sociology or metaphysics. To some extent, I share his basic position that the aim of philosophical argumentation is to explain empirical appearances; otherwise it would be meaningless. In The Two Faces of Justice, Jiwei Ci develops a detailed and persuasive explanatory theory of just disposition that is independent of any normative theories of justice. I have little doubt that this book will prove to be a substantive and interesting contribution to the on-going tradition of Chinese political philosophy as well as to a certain domain of Western political and moral philosophy.