OPSC Polity PYQ — 125 Previous Year Questions

Direction / Passage

In an imperfect world, institutions are required to instantiate ideals of justice, however imperfectly. These institutions may be justified by their approximate instantiation of justice, or they may be deeply unjust when compared with ideal standards - consider the institution of slavery. Justice is an ideal which the world fails to live up to, sometimes despite good intentions, sometimes disastrously. The question of institutive justice raises issues of legitimacy, procedure, codification and interpretation, which are considered by legal theorists and by philosophers of law. Imagine that a person has been made the trustee of a large estate, the owner of which is deceased and the heirs are both ignorant of its existence and independently wealthy in their own right, while also being immensely wasteful and uncharitable. Suppose the trustee and his family of a wife and children are in dire financial straits and that the wealth contained in the estate would be sufficient to relieve them of their distress. It could be argued that the trustee’s duty to distribute those resources in the manner their owner intended should trump the temptation to divert them for the promotion of happiness. This view has been summarised pithily in the observation that the right is (ethically or morally) prior to be good.