Mark LeBar's "Just People"

Mark LeBar is Professor of Philosophy at Florida State University. He is the author of The Value of Living Well (2013), and the editor of Equality and Public Policy (2015) and of Justice (2018).

LeBar applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Just People: Virtue, Equality, and Respect, and shared the following:

Page 99 of my book is a tough place to start, as it is the middle of a complex discussion. It considers the possibility of relying on the judgments of people who are far from virtuous to determine what is the right outlook for particular cases of injustice — say, the issue of the legal subordination of women in a society in which very few people see anything wrong with it. That really matters for the view I defend in the book, because an essential part of the case is that there is no standard beyond the judgments of virtuous people as to what being just people requires. Even if that is so, since the virtuous are scarce on the ground in the best of societies, is my account just a recipe for loss of hope in justice?

On the other hand, the passage on page 99 is a useful lens for engaging with the project of the book. The core aim of the book is to bring back into the foreground thinking about being just as something that we can and must undertake as individuals — entirely independently of the justice of our societies. Sometimes that means being a just person in an unjust society. On page 99 I defend the view that it is the judgment of the just and virtuous — even if they are thin on the ground — that matters, so that we can say that even in a society in which people see nothing wrong with slavery or the subordination of women, we have a metric that shows them to be wrong. All people impose obligations in virtue of what they are, that we are bound to take equally seriously, and to respect. That means our thinking about how to carry out our plans must take them into account as constraints. Being just people means respecting the authority of people equally, and that is something we can do irrespective of the dispositions of others. In that way the Page 99 Test is a useful lens for considering what my book is about.

Learn more about Just People at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue