The Agents of Justice: Towards a Liberal-Egalitarian Theory of Political Agency

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On a widely held view, the ultimate purpose of theorising about justice - indeed, of doing political philosophy at all - is to influence real-world political behaviour. As David Miller puts it: 'I start from the assumption that political philosophy is a branch of practical reason - it is thought whose final aim is to guide action, as opposed to having a merely speculative purpose' (2013, p.34). As of late, a number of critics have argued that theorising about justice habitually fails to live up to this 'action-guiding' vision of political philosophy. For these critics (call them 'agentialists'), this failure stems from the neglect that theorists of justice have shown to a vital matter: the question of whose actions their theorising is supposed to guide. On this view, these theorists have failed to adequately spell out the agents of justice: those agents tasked with realising their favoured principles of justice in real-world political circumstances (O'Neill, 2001). In the first part of the DPhil thesis, I seek to answer three main questions about this nascent 'agential turn' within the contemporary justice literature (Ghazavi, 2023, p.3). The first is interpretative: What is it exactly that agentialists object to in existing attempts to pick out agents of justice? Moreover, is there something which unifies the agentialists' complaints, or does the agential turn consist solely of piecemeal objections? The second is evaluative: How plausible are the agentialists' claims, and to what extent do they threaten the ways in which political philosophers currently think about justice?The third is prescriptive: If the agentialists' claims are shown to be well-founded, how might theorists of justice best respond? Are there certain practices they can adopt in order to mitigate these worries? Building on previous work, I begin by reconstructing two distinct arguments from within the 'agential turn'. The former, which I call agent-pluralism, contends that theorists of justice, in narrowly fixating on the state's role as an agent of justice, have failed to appreciate the plurality of actors who might be crucial agents of justice. The latter, which I call agent-internalism, holds that theorists of justice have not been attentive enough to the dynamics that obtain within prospective agents of justice. Having performed this vital under-labour, I claim that both agent-pluralism and agent-internalism raise serious questions for theorists of justice. After this, I turn to the question of how theorists of justice might best respond to these worries. I suggest that theorists of justice begin by identifying real-world political agents with capabilities to realise justice - a process that may involve theorists entering the field themselves, as illustrated by Bernardo Zacka's (2017) pioneering ethnographic study of frontline public servants. Having done so, these theorists can return to more familiar normative terrain, investigating the ways in which prospective agents of justice are both permitted and obligated to employ their capabilities to realise justice.In the second part of the DPhil thesis, I will apply this method to a variety of potential agents of justice, such as political parties, state bureaucracies, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), transnational corporations (TNCs) and international governmental institutions (IGOs).In the final part of the DPhil thesis, I turn inward to re-examine the practice of political philosophy. Theorising about justice invariably takes place in books and journal articles read exclusively by professional academics, with few theorists directly communicating their findings to potential agents of justice. Is this a problem and, if so, how might it be remedied? Moreover, should we consider political philosophers themselves to be potential agents of justice? If so, how might this bear on their theorising?