… is from page 222 of David Schmidtz’s excellent 2023 book, Living Together:
To articulate principles of justice we can afford to take seriously, we start with an understanding of which institutional frameworks are enabling us to thrive in communities and which are not. Starting this way lets us sort out alleged principles of justice by asking which mutual expectations promote our thriving and which do not.
We fell into thinking of justice as a question of how to slice the pie. Of course, that sometimes is the question. Still, “pie” is a theoretical construct that, at best, represents reality as a snapshot does. A snapshot of a system of green and red lights will make reality look zero-sum. Observers of snapshots see the rich getting richer and imagine this entails that the poor are getting poorer, but the snapshot hides what matters in the long run: traffic management is a process, not an outcome.
