Journey Toward Justice 5

Nick tells that there are two ways in the West that people think about justice: right order conception and inherent rights conception. Plato's Republic, for example, is the former kind while his (Nick's) is the latter kind. Proponents of the former kind holds that a society is just if it is rightly ordered, or rather conforms to certain principle. Proponents of the latter kind holds that a society is just if people are treated as they have a right to be treated. Nick says that Rawls also falls into this right order conception of justice. 

So Plato's conception is of the former kind and so is Rawls' conception. I fancy that Nick would agree that Mill's conception is also of the former kind and also that of the capability approach especially that which is advanced by the likes of Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen; and this would also include the one advanced by Michael Sandel. 

Nick argues that if we look at debates about justice/injustice in the past, those who faced injustice often did not appeal to certain principle to insist that they were wrongly treated; they just spoke about saying that they were denied of their rights and that they were wrongly treated. They were performing their action from the vantage point Nick advances though they may not be developing a theory about it; Nick also did the same thing in the beginning. It was only later that he developed a theory that matches his previous actions. 

This is rather interesting because Nick has argued elsewhere for certain epistemological position which in effects says that there are beliefs (and so actions) that is in us which may not have philosophical ground for taking such a view but over a period of time we come to be aware of such belief and then go on to provide a philosophical ground for holding such a belief. So it's not that philosophical justification/ground always precedes belief; sometimes it could be that belief precedes philosophical justification.