John O'Manique. The Origins of Justice: the Evolution of Morality, Human Rights and Law

Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare, June, 2004 by Dorothy Van Soest

John O'Manique. The Origins of Justice: The Evolution of Morality, Human Rights and Law. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. $36.50 hardover, $26.00 papercover.

If social workers are to take seriously the professional mandate to promote social justice, we need to be rigorous in our thinking about what social justice means and how to go about achieving it. Many of us have experienced the phenomenon of finger-pointing among our peers, with some people claiming to be for social justice while accusing others of not being for social justice, based on a misperception among social workers that we all mean the same thing when we use the term. Yet there is no one perspective of social justice that is the agreed-upon organizing value of social work. Further, there are different conceptualizations about justice--distributive, legal, and commutative--that are based on the social contract tradition that has prevailed among political philosophers from Hobbes, Locke, Kant and Rousseau to John Rawls and Robert Nozick. Contemporary distributive justice theories, particularly those of Rawls and Nozick, serve as a useful tool for social work in that they present an ideal social contract that explains how a just society would be formed rationally, ruled by a moral government and regulated by a defensible moral code.

In The Origins of Justice, O'Manique develops hypotheses about the origins of human rights and justice that challenge the writings of modern theorists such as Rawls and Nozick. The view of human nature and the origins of social justice that he presents are radically different from that of the prevailing Western paradigm altogether. Instead of seeing humans in a negative light as fundamentally aggressive and solitary, O'Manique shifts the emphasis to a more positive characterization of human origins within social communities, in which mutual care and empathy are just as natural and effective as selfish, competitive behavior. His hypotheses, based on neo-Darwinian theory and contemporary research on evolution, are compelling and convincing. Instead of seeing justice as a rational solution to the natural condition of fear and conflict, O'Manique presents evidence to support the hypothesis that human rights, law, and justice arise within caring communities, from the reflections of our early ancesters on genetically based inclinations required for biological development. He shows that humans--once they developed self-consciousness--constructed systems of justice within the context of their communities and cultures that transcended the biological base from which they emerged.

In order to explain justice and its essential elements--morality, human rights and obligations, and law--O'Manique is looking for the origins of justice and seeking to explain justice. Thus, his theory differs from those of Rawls and Nozick in that their theories are normative and present a model of what they would like justice to be. In stark contrast, O'Manique's theory is an empirically based search for actual evolutionary origins of justice rather than a moral argument about what justice should be.

While Rawls and Nozick are perceived to be in opposition--with Rawls representing a liberal view and Nozick representing a neoconservative view--O'Manique argues that their theories begin with virtually the same assumptions about human nature. Those assumptions are consistent with the dominant paradigm of the nature of man (1) as a rational planner, or maximizer, and basically selfish, and a Hobbesian view of life as nasty and solitary. In his exploration, O'Manique shows evidence that human development is distinquished primarily by self-consciousness and its various cognitive manifestations, including understanding, self-conscious feeling, intuition, and reasoning/rationality. While reasoning is indispensable, it is neither primary nor central. Throughout the book, O'Manique explores through the use of scenarios but, unlike the fictional "states of nature" from Hobbes to Rawls and Nozick, the scenarios are drawn from the natural sciences. While they are not confirmed and thus remain hypotheses in the scientific sense, O'Manique's scenarios attempt to get at actual human origins and, thereby, the real origins of justice.

As O'Manique points out at the end of his book, the least understood of the hypotheses necessary for his argument is that our early ancestors lived in communities that were relatively peaceful and benevolent and that they were led by women. While there is much evidence for this, there are also several interpretations of it. While it is not questioned that today's world is patriarchal, the issue of transition is important and the evidence does not provide a clear picture of how that happened. Although contemporary societies are quite Hobbesian, O'Manique is convinced that this is neither the natural state nor the original position.

What might this say about our future? O'Manique's concluding comments are far too brief on this but nonetheless, they leave the reader with a sense of hope. Human origins were convincingly characterized in the book as being both selfish and caring. We may be encouraged by the fact that there is growing movemnent in civil society, outside traditional patriarchal political systems, that counters in various ways the current dysfunctional political, economic, environmental, and social trends that lean heavily on the selfish side of our natures. In the last paragraph of his book, O'Manique declares: "Even more encouraging is the fact that there are more than three billion women on the planet, that they have power wherever they are, and that more of them are moving into positions of traditional political and corporate power. This in itself should shift the central tendency from power-over toward power-wish and move us closer to a natural and developmental balance."