Thinking Global Justice Negatively:

A Schopenhauerian Account of Justice

Brett A. Smith, University of Kentucky

In this essay, I draw on Arthur Schopenhauer’s unknown, and so underappreciated, conception of justice as an alternative to contemporary conceptions of the same. More specifically, I investigate whether, and to what extent, Schopenhauer’s intersubjective, though negative conception of justice—“injure no one”—can serve as the supreme principle in theories of global justice. In doing so, I confront the dominant understanding of justice as a positive conception originating with Aristotle in Nicomachean Ethics, a conception that has been given a seductive contemporary formulation by Rawls (A Theory of Justice) and those influenced by him. The essay is divided into two parts. Part 1 is historical and briefly sketches Schopenhauer’s conception of justice as it derives both from his metaphysics and his criticism of Kant’s deontology. Part 2 seeks to situate this conception within the contemporary frame of global justice. Here, emphasis is placed on the advantages a negative conception of justice has over against positive conceptions.