mind the Economy/ Justice 127

Brian Barry and justice beyond blackmail

by Vittorio Pelligra*

23 November 2025

9' min read

Translated by AI

Versione italiana

9' min read

Translated by AI

Versione italiana

What makes institutions fair? Over the past fifty years, from John Rawls to Amartya Sen, from Michael Walzer to Nancy Fraser, the search for an answer to this question has given rise to models, concepts, and thought experiments that have reshaped the way we think about democratic coexistence today. In this plural mosaic there is one voice, that of the British philosopher Brian Barry, which stands out, certainly, among the clearest and most limpid. For Barry has done a simple but radical thing: he has taken seriously the fact that human beings live together despite being different, and that justice cannot be merely the elegant translation of a compromise between egoists, nor a calculation of convenience between power groups. It is on this terrain, the boundary between expediency and impartiality, that the central theoretical battle of Barry's first major book, Theories of Justice (1989) takes shape. And it is from here that we must start in order to understand his challenge, which is more relevant today than ever in a time of growing inequalities and frayed social contracts where a rising mutual distrust, between states and between citizens, seems to dominate.

What, then, makes an institution, a just institution? The answer Brian Barry proposes takes shape from a slow liberation from a misunderstanding that still dominates much of contemporary social thought: the idea that at the basis of justice there is a balance of advantages, a pact between rational egoists forced by life's circumstances to cooperate.

The pact between egoists: an ancient temptation

Barry finely reconstructs the genealogy of this misunderstanding, showing how from Glaucon to Hobbes, from Hume to the game theorists of the 20th century, the idea that dominates is simple: justice is the deal that suits everyone, given the circumstances. Or, more brutally: everyone must give something up if they want to avoid more costly conflicts. It is an idea that still fascinates many today, because it promises order without moralism, stability without ideology. But for Barry, this vision is a gigantic misunderstanding. Not because people are not driven by the pursuit of their own advantage, but because advantage is never neutral: it arises from conditions of power that have not been chosen and that can offer no impartial foundation for the social order. Barry not only challenges the historical genealogy: he gets to the heart of the model and dismantles it from within. He does so with the example, which has become classic, of the 'nuisance neighbours' (noxious neighbours).

The case of the noxious neighbours

Let us imagine two neighbours: one wants silence, the other likes to listen to loud music. It is the classic example of minimal conflict, used by game theory to illustrate the need for mutual agreements. But Barry turns it into a philosophical device. Because the point is not to find the compromise: the point is to understand what it depends on whether that compromise can be considered fair or not. Suppose, says Barry, that the noisy neighbour has more time, more energy, more means to resist conflict. It could assert its position until the other, exhausted, gives way. Sure: the end result would be 'mutually beneficial' compared to a daily war of constant spite and abuse. But Barry asks us to look deeper. Would such an agreement really be fair given that it is based on an asymmetry of power? Can a compromise that is reached 'only because the alternative is worse' be considered fair?

The case of the noxious neighbours may seem trivial, but, in fact, it constitutes a powerful conceptual model, because it illuminates all those situations in which an agreement appears 'reasonable' only because one of the parties is in such a weak position that it cannot reject the terms proposed to it. Barry uses it to show that many institutions that appear cooperative often arise from nothing more than the exercise of asymmetrical power. Think of a worker who chooses to accept mandatory overtime. Formally he has two options, he can accept or refuse. But if he refuses, the probability of not having his contract renewed increases. On paper the agreement is 'mutually beneficial': the company covers a production peak and the worker keeps his job. In reality it is a classic case of noxious neighbours. The 'point of non-agreement', the non-renewal of the contract, is infinitely more costly for the worker than for the company. The cooperative advantage masks a structural blackmail. It is not a compromise, but the result of an asymmetry of power.

Let us try to imagine a company that proposes to open a polluting plant in a small, economically fragile municipality, promising jobs, the construction of some infrastructure, free holidays for employees' children, and some school funds. The municipality 'accepts' because the alternative is economic decline. But even here the asymmetry is total: the municipality has very few development alternatives, the company can choose between dozens of territories, the environmental damage falls on the weakest. The agreement appears to be based on mutual benefit, but it is only so because the municipality's starting point is a 'worst case scenario'.

A tenant with a very low income accepts to live in a damp, dilapidated flat because he cannot afford anything else. Alternatively, he would have to live in a car or on the street. The landlord rents without renovating anything. It is a formally unimpeachable contract, a freely signed agreement that benefits both parties. In reality it is based on an indirect imposition resulting from the needy condition of one of the parties. Yet another case of 'nuisance neighbour'.

The same could be said of a developing country, crushed by debt, that chooses to accept draconian conditions from an international financial institution: privatisation, welfare cuts, indiscriminate opening to foreign capital. Is this a voluntary agreement? Only in a technical sense. In a moral sense, it is a global noxious neighbour. Its point of non-cooperation - default, capital flight, welfare collapse - is infinitely more costly than that of the creditor.

And what about the riders who accept poorly paid deliveries because the alternative is zero earnings? Of the drivers of e-commerce platforms who choose not to take breaks because otherwise the algorithm would penalise them. The balance appears 'mutually beneficial' because on the one hand the platform maximises the flow of deliveries and on the other hand the worker receives something. But even here more than mutual benefit is the blackmail of vulnerability.

What do all these cases have in common? This is exactly what Brian Barry wants to show with the example of 'nuisance neighbours'. An agreement, in itself, cannot be considered a sign of justice. Co-operation, in itself, is not sufficient to found a moral norm, because an equilibrium is often just a compromise between unequals in which bargaining power is the invisible ingredient that decides the outcome. This 'justice' based on mutual benefit is in fact 'necessarily corrupted by the asymmetry of positions' (p. 48)

It is not the existence of a freely entered into agreement that defines a 'just' situation, but only its being based on principles that no one, from a moral position of equality, would have reason to reject. Our attention, therefore, in the search for what defines a just institution, should move from the consequences - the making of an agreement - to the causes - the principles, that is, on which it is based.

When the starting point already decides everything

Barry's first critique of theories of justice based on mutual advantage is, therefore, founded on the role of the so-called "non-agreement point", the point of non-agreement from which the parties move in their bargaining process. This criticism highlights that if one of the two is already in an advantageous position because he has more than the other in terms of money, time, resources, knowledge, power, the resulting agreement will tend to consolidate that difference, masking it behind a veneer of justice. If the bargaining base is unequal, the idea of justice as mutual advantagewill only bless a pre-existing injustice.

This is why Barry concludes that a theory of justice that accepts 'a starting point marked by natural or social advantages' cannot be considered truly normative. It will at best be a descriptive theory, because it tells us how the world works, not how it should work.

The decisive step: from interest to impartiality

The alternative Barry proposes is methodological in nature. He does not ask people to give up their interests, nor to be so altruistic as to put the interests of others ahead of their own. He only asks them to consider what principles could be accepted by anyone under conditions of moral equality. Not biological equality, nor social equality, but moral equality. In this sense, principles of justice emerge as those principles, among all possible ones, that 'well-informed individuals under conditions of equality could not reasonably reject' (p. 113). We find here a great affinity with Thomas Scanlon's position, which we analysed some time ago (Mind the Economy of 9-16-23 March 2025) according to which justice is not what everyone is willing to accept, but what no one can reject without producing injustice. The difference is huge because consent can be extorted, bought, manipulated. Reasonable non-refusal, on the other hand, requires conditions of equality that society must actively guarantee and not passively assume.

And us today?

At first glance, this debate seems far removed from the most relevant issues of contemporary debate, from our immediate interests, from the great problems that plague the present. In reality, Barry's work merely highlights the root of many of our ills, namely the fact that we live in societies that have deeply internalised the logic of mutual advantage: in labour relations, in conditional welfare, in the tax structure, in school meritocracy. The language of mutual benefit is the dominant one: 'if it suits everyone, then it is fair'.

Barry's work forces us to recognise that a society can be both perfectly cooperative and profoundly unjust. It can function, it can grow, it can gain consensus, and yet, it can base its basic institutions on power relations that no one on equal terms would dream of accepting.

Justice does not settle for cooperation, because it knows that even the deepest injustices can be cooperative. It does not settle for stability, because it knows that even the most enduring oppressions can be stable. It does not settle for consensus, because it knows that even the most violent agreements can be formally 'consensual'.

Justice, as Barry imagines it, does not arise at the point where interests meet, but at the point where reasons are recognised. It is a moral project, before being political: the building of institutions that never ask anyone to pay the price of cooperation by giving up their dignity. When Barry criticises justice as a 'mutual advantage', he is not attacking an abstract theory: he is denouncing the way in which, all too often, societies justify relations of force disguised as compromises. And he invites us to shift our gaze: from the outcome of the agreement to the moral assumptions that make it acceptable. He reminds us, with a rigour that today seems almost counter-cultural, that no society can be said to be just if it allows vulnerability, fear or lack of alternatives to become criteria for political justification.

We are used to thinking of democracy as a system of aggregate preferences, as the sum of individual wills balancing each other out. Barry reminds us that democracy is also, and above all, a moral enterprise: the construction of a world in which people can look at each other without fear, without suspicion, without having to calculate the price of other people's power every time. A world in which no one has to be 'the annoying neighbour' or, above all, the one who has to put up with it because he has no alternative.

It is from here that the decisive step towards the heart of his philosophy takes shape: impartiality as a method of removing justice from the tyranny of interest. Not an abstraction, not an unattainable ideal, but the minimum condition to demand that institutions be fair for all, and not just beneficial to the majority or the strongest.

Next week we will go into the heart of his proposal, the one he develops in his 1995 Justice as Impartiality. A book in which impartiality becomes a living principle, a form of mutual respect, a way to build institutions that are not only stable, but also just, fair for everyone. A demanding equality, the one Barry proposes, not an arithmetical one: the moral equality of all who live under the same institutions. If Theories of Justice teaches us that many social balances are unjust, Justice as Impartiality will show us how to imagine institutions that do not need injustice to function. And how to reconstruct a common language for a society made not only of competing interests, but of people in relation.
(*) Professor of Economics, Department of Economics and Business - University of Cagliari