The cry for justice is as old as recorded human thought. When people believe that they have been treated unfairly, they cry to their god or their comrades that justice must be served. In the most generic sense, justice exists when there is reciprocity between what the agent has done and the circumstances of their life. When circumstances are out of balance with the character and actions of the agents, then the cry of injustice is raised. The deep assumption that underlies the demand for justice that everyone should get what they deserve. This demand underlies the law of karma and the laws of the land; it informs ideas of the fairness of contracts and the legitimacy of democratic law-making.

Considered from a social perspective, justice in general takes on different concrete forms: criminal justice, economic justice, etc. Although theories differ, the sense of fairness at work in theories of social justice is easy enough to understand in terms of reciprocity between action and outcome. I follow the law, I should not be arrested; I upheld my side of the contract, I should get paid. But what about when there is no action on the part of the agent as the basis of the claim that they deserve something in return? Do human beings deserve anything simply in virtue of being born? If the answer is ‘yes,’ then I think we can talk meaningfully about “existential” justice.

I have been turning the idea of existential justice over in my head for years without really committing myself to trying to systematically unpack it. These reflections might be the beginning of a commitment to formally develop the idea, or they might be the end. In any case, they are offered here in the spirit of thinking out loud. But sometimes the thinking out loud is more important than rigorous argument. It can be the source of the intellectual energy of a philosophical idea that opens up a new perspective on an old problem.

Let us take a couple of concrete examples to begin the exploration of existential justice. Everyone will agree that there is such a thing as economic justice or criminal justice. Different political perspectives will provide different answers to what arrangement is actually just, but no one would agree that it is meaningless to ask what a defendant accused of a crime deserves or what a fair economic arrangement is. We might say that those charged with an offence deserve a fair trial and that those who work deserve to reap the fruit of their labours. In these concrete cases, ‘justice” is a function of interests generated by participation in a social institution. If there were no crime there would be no criminal justice system, and if we did not have to work on nature in order to produce the goods that we need and devise a means to distribute the products there would be no economic system and therefore no question about what economic agents deserve.

But since there are laws and we do have to produce and distribute the product of collective labour there are important questions about justice in these domains. But what would “existential” justice mean? If there is such a thing, then it would be the answer to the question of whether there is something human beings deserve simply in virtue of being born, i.e., coming into existence. I think that there is a meaningful answer to this question.

Since we do not choose to be born or to be the sort of organisms that we are, we come into the world requiring access to certain non-optional resources and goods. Thus, I think that it is meaningful to say that everyone born deserves to come into existence in social circumstances that ensure that their basic human life-requirements can be met. Those include the biologically obvious: nurture, shelter, clothing, but also the less physically quantifiable: care and love. Since we do not choose the identity that others will recognize us by I think one can also say that people deserve to be born into social and cultural contexts in which they will not suffer from belonging to a demonized and oppressed group. We are owed these things by the circumstances of life because no one chooses these life-requirements and they cannot, at least initially, satisfied them by their own individual efforts. Infants are not capable of working for the sake of satisfying their own needs or changing who they are. People who are born into situations of social collapse, war, systematic poverty and oppression against the group that they belong to are victims, I think, of existential injustice.

By calling it existential injustice I intend to put the stress on the circumstances and not the parents. Some people might reasonably argue that parents who conceive and give birth in war zones or racist regimes are causally responsible for the harms that their babies will suffer. But even if that response has some truth to it, it focuses on the parents and not the infant. Whatever the parents were doing or intending, once the infant exists it faces a set of problems it did not choose to face and cannot solve on its own: the very circumstances of its existence, therefor, are unjust. Whomever or whatever is causally responsible does not matter from the infant’s point of view. It emerges into a world that it cannot control but which poses serious threats to its present and future well-being. It does not deserve to suffer for social problems it had no role in creating. Everyone is therefore born, if this argument is correct, with a basic set of legitimate claims on life-protecting and health-promoting resources, institutions, and relationships. Any circumstances which systematically restrict access to these goods are existentially unjust.

Another way of putting that point would be to say that some social circumstances are inhuman because they impede the ability of parents or surrogates to care for the new life that is constantly coming into the world. There might be justice in punishing a criminal if they are guilty of a crime, but there can be no justification at all, ever, for imposing harms on infants who did not and could not choose to come into being. There can be no defence for existential injustice on grounds of political expediency or guilt on the part of the victim when the victims are one second old infants. They cannot be causally responsible for their emergence into existentially unjust, inhuman circumstances. Therefore, I conclude, every birth is a protest against existential injustice and a demand to transform the world so as to ensure that every child is born into a nurturing, caring, loving world,

Parents must of course think about the world into which they are bringing new humans, but if the human project is to continue then new people must be born. No group should be prevented or prevent themselves from bringing new life into the world because current conditions are existentially unjust. Birth is also a protest against inhuman conditions and hope in the problem solving capacities of human beings. Unless we want to voluntarily declare an end to the human project, agree to stop reproducing, and let ourselves peacefully die out, the solution to the inhuman conditions into which some people are born is to solve the problems, not to scold parents for bringing new life into the world. While the critters might be happy if human beings disappeared, our disappearance would risk allowing the only fully self-conscious beings in the universe to disappear thus cause a loss that might be a sort of existential injustice in its own right

In a sense, we are nature’s highest ‘creation.’ If there are other fully self-conscious beings in the universe, we have not discovered each other. If we go, we risk contributing to a universe in which there is no entity capable of fully valuing and honouring it. Only human beings, so far as we know, can value the universe aesthetically and scientifically and build higher unities of beauty and understanding through the creative work we alone are capable of doing. While it makes no sense to argue that we owe a debt to the Big Bang and blind evolutionary forces, we can impose an obligation on ourselves to work to solve our problems and keep going, not only for the sake of our individual and collective enjoyment, but also because our extinction would remove capacities which are perhaps so improbable that they have never fully evolved before and might never again.

If that argument seems a rather long way around to a banal political conclusion– do not allow inhuman, existentially unjust social situations to fester– consider it a means of expanding the circle of our care and concern beyond the little patch of earth each individual occupies from moment to moment. It is true that just as no individual is born deserving to suffer, so too no individual is born owing already existing people anything. Human beings are not born guilty in any sense. Neither the brutally oppressed nor the privileged chose the life they are born into. Everyone comes into the world with the same legitimate claim on sufficient resources for the purposes of living meaningful, valuable and valued lives. Each is also a being with the potential to develop into a social-self-conscious intelligence that can encompass the whole expanse of time and space in mind: to both feel and know themselves part of a greater reality; not a heaven beyond, but the real, physical heavens above. One can realize that and say: “great, now pass my beer.” Or one can realize that they just as well could have been born in a rubbish heap, hunted and despised, and conclude: there is nothing special about me other than the undeserved luck to be born in a safe environment, with people who did enough to care for me and a society that educated me to the point where I can comprehend my living connections to everything else.

From that recognition it does not follow that the fortunate individual owes every other individual a personal debt. What does follow, I suggest, is a general obligation to try to understand why the world is as it is and contribute to the progressive solution of the causes of existential injustice. The undeserved benefits of birth here rather than there should not rob anyone of the capacity to enjoy life. First, wallowing in guilt but otherwise doing nothing does not solve the problems, but even more deeply, everyone has just this one life to live. There is nothing wrong with enjoying the life that you did not choose to begin. At the same time, we are all in the world together, with senses and minds that bring us into contact with the circumstances of others’ lives. We cannot, reasonably, turn totally away from reality, but we are also not individually responsible for how reality came to be the way it is or for changing it. I do not think that Simone Weil, who starved herself to death because she could not bear the thought eating while others went hungry is an example of saintliness. However much one can learn from her otherwise, self-mortification to the point of death is not existential justice but moralistic irrationality.

Yet if we are born blameless we are not born without implicit responsibilities. As we develop we incur debts to those whose labour sustained us and the the natural world which supports all life. We cannot eat and claim that others are not harmed by starvation. We cannot enjoy the protections of law and deny that others equally need its protection. When we see situations which manifestly deny other’s access to what they need as social-self-conscious intelligences, our own intelligence must rebel. As Gandhi once wrote to Rabindranath Tagore “When war comes the poet must put down his lyre.” In other words, we have responsibilities to our time. No one is obligated to sacrifice every moment of their lives for the sake of others, but no one is free to completely ignore the realities of the world either. Existential injustice sensitizes us to the implications of the circumstances of birth. We do not choose to be born or where we are born, so the initial circumstances of life are not deserved. But as we mature we become aware of our surroundings, first in our immediate environment, and then outward in expanding circles. We cannot not be aware of our world (whether narrowly or broadly construed), but we can choose and work to ignore information.

No one is guilty for being born, but we are responsible, and therefore are guilty, for the choices we make to ignore the reality of existential injustice. We are parts of a world, not monadic worlds unto ourselves. We can wall ourselves off and be happy– ignorance is bliss- but no one is ignorant naturally, one must make themselves so. As the great neo-Confucian philosopher Wang Yang Ming wrote, if we open ourselves to it, we can recognize the humanity (jen) that connects all people (and all people to all animals and inanimate things). This recognition requires no special intelligence. “Even the mind of the small (uneducated) man is no different,” he says, “he himself makes it small.” Making our minds small, cultivated ignorance about what other people must somehow live through does, is culpable. When the war is over the poet can return to their beautiful harmonies, Gandhi adds, but when others are fighting one must join the cause.

But the problems of the world are vast and the powers of individuals small. But individuals do not live in the ‘world,’ they live in concrete times and places. We are not responsible for each other in the moralistic abstract. We are responsible for recognizing our shared humanity and acting in accordance with capacity. Those of us who live in democracies act responsibly by electing politicians who refuse to fan the flames of war, life-destructive violence, and environmental degradation. Those of us who think for a living must work to find the connections between whatever it is that interests us and the existence of the wider world that enables us to be active philosophically or scientifically. Everyone who becomes aware of what actually goes on in the world can at the very least state clearly what goes on, whether or not they have a full grasp of the causes and even if they do not (and no one does) have an immediately workable solution. And what goes on in the world is that some infants are in reality and through no fault of their own born on rubbish heaps, starved, and bombed, and killed.