Brian Barry and impartiality as the foundation of social justice

Let us imagine a medium-sized Italian city. For years, the municipality has guaranteed full-time education in primary schools: a service that is not only a support for families, but also a fundamental educational aid, especially in the most vulnerable neighbourhoods. This year, however, closing the budget is more complicated than usual. The administration has to cut back. A proposal is beginning to circulate to maintain after-school care only in affluent neighbourhoods, where families will be able to contribute private funds. In poorer areas, precisely where the service would be most needed, full-time education would be abolished. The measure, on the surface, has an iron logic: the municipality saves resources, the wealthy neighbourhoods keep the service, the poor neighbourhoods 'adapt'. Nobody really protests, because the vulnerable families know that nothing would be introduced in place of full-time anyway, and that a rejection of the proposal would be completely pointless. It is a 'cooperative balance'. Everyone agrees to accept this proposal as the best of what is realistically possible.

But beneath this apparent plausibility lies a fundamental error. We are taking the wrong perspective, that of those who accept the deal. And if we only look at acceptance, then the municipality's proposal does not seem so scandalous. No one takes to the streets, no appeal to the TAR, public opinion speaks of 'responsible compromise'. But let us try, for a moment, to change perspective, to consider the gaze of those who would have every reason to refuse. According to Barry's criterion, it is not so much the aggregate benefits that count, it is not that everyone agrees and that the balance is cooperative and stable. What matters is that that agreement is the result of an initial asymmetrical distribution of power. We should ask ourselves, then, who, if we started from a truly level playing field, would have reasons to reject this policy? The answer to the question thus posed suddenly becomes obvious: families in the poorest neighbourhoods, i.e. precisely those on whom the greatest cost of the budget cut falls. The fact that they do not protest is not a sign of justice, it is a symptom of their contractual weakness. 'People accept unjust conditions,' Barry writes, 'not because they think they are fair, but because they have no real possibility of rejecting them' (Why Social Justice Matters, Polity Press, 2005, p. 94). If we analyse the situation with a modicum of institutional finesse, we immediately see that the abolished service in the poor neighbourhood is not 'one more luxury'. It is a matter of guaranteeing children a protected environment in the afternoons, of putting everyone in the same minimum educational condition, of allowing parents, often with precarious jobs, to maintain employment, of counteracting the formation of a 'two-speed' school. The abolition of after-school care is not neutral. It has a specific weight, a clear direction. It always falls on those who are least able to make up for it with private resources. It is this structural asymmetry, not the dissent expressed, that is the raw material with which any idea of justice must be confronted.

Let us consider a second example. Let us imagine a region that has to rationalise its healthcare spending. An elegant word, 'rationalise', which, however, when it comes to public budgets, almost always means one precise thing: cut. One of the measures on the table is the closure of small territorial medicine centres in inland towns and the most fragile urban peripheries in order to concentrate care in two large hospital centres. The measure has its rationality from an economic point of view because it would reduce the duplication of services, allowing investment in advanced technology and avoiding the dispersion of health personnel.

Citizens in the larger centres support the reform politically. They perceive it as an improvement. Those in the inner areas, on the other hand, protest, but they are few and elderly and the protest is weak. Soon their voice of dissent is no longer heard. Now for a visit one has to travel thirty, forty, fifty kilometres. Many have no means to go elsewhere, public transport is not particularly efficient, there is not even private healthcare to make up for it, there is really no possibility of 'choosing' an alternative. But the reform is implemented anyway. Urban centres get more services, inland areas adapt. Here too there seems to be a 'balance': nobody gets everything, everybody gets something, or so it appears.

Again, as in the case of after-school care, acceptance does not come from approval, but from a lack of alternatives.

To understand this, we can apply the 'fairness test' and reverse the perspective. If we start from a situation of moral parity, power, resources, etc., who would have the best reasons to reject this reorganisation? The answer is obvious: the lonely elderly person who cannot drive, the chronically ill person who struggles to get around, the single mother who would have to take two buses for a check-up; the precarious worker who would lose a day's pay to get to the hospital in the big city. The fact that they no longer protest is not a sign of consent, it is only the consequence of their contractual and political weakness. People also accept unfair conditions when they have no real possibility of rejecting them. And so geographical differences turn into social distance, which then becomes inequality in access to services, while the majority of citizens, those who live in large centres, consider such policies to be entirely reasonable.

This is what the emphasis on impartiality is for: to prevent what the majority accepts from automatically being deemed right. Its function is to shift our gaze from collective advantage to individual vulnerability. The lens of impartiality forces us into a non-intuitive but necessary exercise of 'counterfactual' reasoning. That is, we must imagine informed individuals, in conditions of moral equality, not manipulable, not blackmailed by need. Let us then try to ask these individuals to evaluate the policy in question: abolish after-school care only in poor neighbourhoods, reduce territorial health centres in small towns? We ask whether, from that position, anyone could reasonably reject them. The answer now becomes obvious. Those who would be systematically harmed by these measures would have overwhelming reasons to oppose them. And that is what, for Barry, defines injustice. And that is what makes us understand the difference between cooperation and fairness.

In hisSpheres of Justice, Michael Walzer argues that every society possesses 'shared meanings' that define the nature of social goods and, consequently, the criteria of their distribution. Bread, education, care, political power: each good has its 'own' distributional logic, rooted historically and culturally (see Mind the Economy of 23/03/2025). Justice, in this view, is not based on universal principles, but on the interpretation of the social meanings communities attach to the goods they consider important. Walzer's is a dense theory, a form of communitarianism that is sensitive to plurality and respectful of traditions. But precisely here Barry sees the problem. The crux of his critique is simple: if the criteria of justice are entirely 'internal' to each community, how can we, from within, criticise those forms of injustice that may emerge from those same traditions? Think of gender discrimination and patriarchy, for example, or of caste societies. According to the Walzerian principle, if such practices are consistent with the local meanings that members of those communities accept and share, then there is no criterion for condemning them. It is the transformation of 'what is shared' into 'what is right'. For Barry, this outcome is unacceptable. A theory of justice must allow unjust practices to be judged even when they are widely accepted. This is where the idea of impartiality comes into play once again, the need for a point of view that is not captured by the existing symbolic order. For if shared meanings alone define justice, then no culturally rooted discrimination can be challenged, no structural inequality can be criticised if it derives from an established value system, no minority can demand justice if the majority interprets those goods in the opposite way. But just as in the case of 'mutual benefit', we cannot accept that justice depends on social consensus; if we were to accept the 'internal' definition of justice, we would be giving up any means of countering injustices rooted in social and cultural structures. While consensus may be a sociological fact, justice is a moral criterion.

Barry's proposal is based, on the contrary, on a 'minimal universalism', based on criteria that every individual can accept regardless of his or her social identity. A universalism founded on the principles of impartiality of institutions, of equal consideration, on the refusal to justify privileges with culturally based arguments, and on redistributive criteria that do not depend on affiliations or traditions. Justice cannot be merely a hermeneutic exercise; it must possess sufficient strength to challenge and question even the most entrenched social practices and norms from within. It is a defence of the idea that there are moral criteria that we must be able to apply even against our own customs and traditions, even if these are accepted and shared in our own culture or group. It is the minimum condition of democratic criticism.

The examples of after-school and community healthcare show why Barry considers impartiality a form of institutional protection, not an ethical ideal. It is a way to prevent politics from thinking only in terms of efficiency or appeasement. It is what prevents democracy from becoming a fancy name for the administration of inequality. As long as we do not answer the question of who might reject a certain agreement, we would not be assessing the justice of that rule or institution; we would only be observing the exercise of power in its most civilised form.

The impartiality of which Barry speaks takes the form of an 'architecture of fairness', a set of conceptual tools designed to unmask what appears in political processes as a reasonable compromise but which, in reality, rests on opaque and asymmetrical power relations.

From an individual point of view, we can never be completely impartial: each of us looks at the world through our own affiliations, our own histories, our own wounds. Yet we can, and must, build impartial institutions, procedures that force politics to measure itself against the most uncomfortable test: the gaze of those who have less voice, less opportunity, less power to refuse. This is the decisive point. Justice is not what everyone accepts, but what no one could reasonably refuse if we started from equal moral standing. It is the fine line between a system that works and one that is truly just.

The examples of after-school care being abolished in the most fragile neighbourhoods, and of health centres being removed from the suburbs, show policies that 'work' perfectly from the point of view of political and economic balances. They do not generate riots or institutional blockades. They are stable. But it is precisely that stability that makes them suspect. Social peace is not always the measure of a just order. It can also be a symptom of resignation, a civilised form of powerlessness.

This is where impartiality shows its value. Not in levelling out differences, but in protecting those who may be crushed by differences. Not in producing consensus, but in ensuring the possibility of dissent. Not in pacifying conflict, but in preventing conflict from being resolved to the advantage of those who have more resources and can therefore impose their views. In this sense, impartiality is nothing other than a commitment to building institutions that make justice independent of fear, of need, of the power of the majority of the moment.