Boltanski, Luc & Thevenot, Laurent (2000) - The Reality of Moral Expectations. A Sociology of Situated Judgement

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The reality of moral expectations: A

sociology of situated judgement
a b c d
Luc Boltanski & Laurent Thévenot
a
Professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences
Sociales , Paris
b
Founder of the Groupe de Sociologie Politique et Morale E-
mail:
c
Professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences
Sociales , Paris
d
Director of the Groupe de Sociologie Politique et Morale E-
mail:
Published online: 28 Jun 2007.
To cite this article: Luc Boltanski & Laurent Thévenot (2000) The reality of moral
expectations: A sociology of situated judgement, Philosophical Explorations: An
International Journal for the Philosophy of Mind and Action, 3:3, 208-231, DOI:
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The Reality of Moral
Expectations: A Sociology
of Situated Judgement
Luc Boltanski & Laurent Thévenot
Taking the sense of justice seri-

Abstract ously requires breaking with the
strictly causal approaches that
The paper offers a modelling of the sense of justice are often considered essential to
as it is displayed in ordinary situated disputes. While the social sciences. These
this model accounts for a plurality of legitimate approaches ignore the concern
forms of evaluation which are used in the process of for the good that persons are
critique and justification, it escapes a relativism of moved by, and ignore the ques-
values by demonstrating that all these forms satisfy a tion of what is just, leaving that
set of common requirements. The reasonable charac- to the conscientious attention of
ter of the everyday sense of justice is also anchored researchers. They will be trou-
in a reality test involving the engagement of objects bled by the idea that persons are
which qualify for a certain form of evaluation. The moved by a concern for the
paper discusses this model in relation to competing good, because it complicates the
theories of justice, and models of social action and scientific task of laying bare the
interaction. objective causes of human
action. Taking this observation
as a starting point, our work has
been to construct a model in which the normative views of persons could be fully
considered. This meant building a bridge between the social sciences and moral
philosophy.
I .Taking the sense of justice seriously
The main goal of the model of analysis of the 'orders of worth', presented in our
book On Justification (Boltanski & Thévenot, 1991), was to provide an instrument
with which to analyse the operations persons perform when they resort to criti-
cism, when they have to justify the criticisms they produce, when they justify
themselves in the face of criticism or collaborate in the pursuit of a justified agree-
1 For a concise presentation in English, while awaiting the forthcoming translation of the book, see
Boltanski & Thévenot 1999.
208 Philosophical Explorations • N r 3 • September 2000 • 208-231

— The Reality of Moral Expectations: A Sociology of Situated Judgement ^ ^
ment.1 The privileged object of the model consists of situations that are submit-
ted to the imperative ojjustification. These situations are far from rare in ordinary
life, as is demonstrated by the empirical research accompanying the construction
of this model. The model differs in this from constructions that, in the final analy-
sis, tend to reduce all social relations to relations oj power, which is often the case
with works of Marxist inspiration. It also differs from constructions that seek to
treat these relations as strategies that are employed by persons in order to opti-
mize their interest, as in the different forms of utilitarianism-derived sociology.
These latter constructions are not capable of dealing with the demands of justice
expressed by persons, and they reduce these demands to ideological masks, and
sometimes even completely ignore them. Focusing on the moments of criticism
and justification, the model we constructed does not purport to account for all
the facts and gestures that are habitually called 'social'. The type of analysis made
possible by the model does not operate via an account of the dispositions or deter-
minations inscribed once and for all in the agents, and which guide their behav-
iour in all situations. Instead of the dispositionalist model often adopted by con-
temporary sociologies (even if this happens implicitly), we offer an analysis of the
constraints that derive from situated arrangements.2 This approach, however,
does not presuppose a reduction to the local, as these situated arrangements only
make sense, as will be seen, in reference to conventional orders.
The model does not aspire to an exhaustive comprehension, and one will
vainly search here for a matrix that allows social reality to be described in all its
aspects. Persons are not constantly focused on justice, and the demand of justice
is far from necessarily present in all the situations in which they interact. The
model of the orders of worth acknowledges, without systematically exposing it to
suspicion, the possibility that is offered to persons to ground their criticisms on
these demands of justice or to converge towards justifiable agreements. It does
not, however, try to reduce the social to the question of justice. Not all situations
are subject to an imperative of justification to the same degree. The demand of
justification is indeed indissolubly linked to the possibility of criticism. It is often
necessary to support criticism or to respond to criticism. Yet, on the one hand,
criticism is not always equally possible in all situations. On the other hand, crit-
icized persons are not always bound to explain themselves and to return argu-
ment for argument. They can, notably, impose their positions by relying on the
implicit or explicit threat of violence, or even on the justification of urgence,
which practically boils down to the same. But these borderline situations cannot
be limitlessly extended, and it is clear that justice must be treated as one of the
regimes that are capable of controlling the moves on which social activity is
based.3
2 For a comparison of Pierre Bourdieu's 'dispositionalist' sociology with the 'pragmatist' sociologies
of Boltanski and Thévenot, Bruno Latour and Michel Callon, see: Benatouil 1999.
3 One can find analyses of the relations between the regime of justice and other action regimes in
Boltanski 1990 and Thévenot 1990; for texts in the English language, see: Boltanski 1999,
Thévenot 2000a, 2000b. Peter Wagner discusses this programme in Wagner 1999.
209
^ ^ Luc Bohanski <£ Laurent Th^venot ^ ^
The modelling of competencies
To analyse the situations that are subject to the regime of justification and the
kind of actions that unfold there, we start from the claims made by persons. The
model does not posit any universals to begin with, but poses universality as a
horizon searched after by agents. This approach is able to independently start
from persons with different grammars of justice, and aims to clarify the differ-
ences and the points of convergence between these grammars. In this way, we
think we can contribute to a clarification of the question of moral universalism.
Constructed as a tool for the explanation of the ordinary sense of justice, the
model of the orders of worth can be integrated in a normative orientation,
because it performs, as a reflexive turn on the sense of justice, an operation of
rule-setting, of determination of different types of common good, and of legiti-

mate or illegitimate relations between these common goods. This work of expla-
nation is particularly normative when it is performed on the demands shared by
the different orders of worth which all acknowledge a common humanity. A ten-
sion develops between this requirement of humanity and the necessity to define
a legitimate order to satisfy the concerns of justice.
The model is a competence model, a formalization of the competence persons
put to use when they act by referring to a sense of justice, and when they rely on
arrangements in reality that support and comfort this competence, by guarantee-
ing it the possibility of being efficient. Nevertheless, establishing this model
requires us to ascend to a level of generality, and our empirical observations only
provide us with partial, constantly reactualized sketches. To cope with this, our
strategy has been to confront the observations and the utterances from the field
with partially formalized constructions borrowed from political philosophy.
The necessity to submit the development of the model to a formal construc-
tion directly derives from our will to take seriously the claims of justice made by
the actors. We had to demonstrate the solidity of these claims and prevent them
from being too easily reduced to hypocritical moves associated with the defence
of particular interests or to unfounded illusions. To achieve this it must indeed be
possible to demonstrate in what way they will satisfy certain conditions of valid-
ity which support a demand of universalization, and to make explicit the kind of
rationality on which they rely. This indispensable basis of a form of rationality
that is defendable in all generality cannot be immediately demonstrated by a sim-
ple registering of the utterances by the actors, for these actors rarely make explic-
it the general principles of their actions. To correctly interpret the observations in
the field, we had to have the possibility to link the empirically observable reality
with formal models.
This, of course, is not to say that these formal models have a claim to univer-
sal validity, at least not without any further examination. Born from the shaping
of the competence in justice certifiable today in our society, they cannot be
extended towards other societies or other periods without the careful work of
analysis that intends to confront them with the arguments that are developed by
the persons that belong to those societies. Without any examination one cannot
determine the area of validity of these models, nor the modifications that they
210
^^™ The Reality of Moral Expectations: A Sociology of Situated Judgement •""»•
need, to assure their extension towards other societies and other periods.4 The
different commonwealths which the model has to integrate in order to account for
the competence injustice possessed by the members of our society do in fact have
historical traits that are clearly formulated in On Justification.5
But first some remarks on the beings to be found in the model. It primarily
recognizes the existence of persons-in-acts characterized by different positions and
chances. First of all, it aims to recapture the constraints that limit the possibilities
of action available to persons when they enter into the regime of justice. These
constraints, however, are not treated as internal determinations. As said before,
we did not set ourselves the task of recapturing properties that determined the
conduct of the agents in all circumstances, as if these were irreversibly inscribed
into them and in their corporeal habits. Indeed, these properties, which other
sociological constructions necessarily bring into account, develop a tension with

the operations that persons perform when they have set their minds on justice.
Actually, the persons will search for them, in order to demonstrate what weight
they add to the scales, when they intend to denounce the unjust nature of a situa-
tion. The constraints we seek to illuminate are those associated with the arrange-
ment of the situation in which the persons are placed. We consider the capacity
to grasp them and to take them into account as part of the competence of all nor-
mal members of the same society. Not unlike rules of grammar, these constraints
are not of an unconscious nature, in the sense that certain censures, connected
with interests or prohibitions, would prevent their explicit formulation by the
actors. This is so, even if, in most of the practical situations, the actors feel no
need to render them explicit and to resort to common higher principles that give
meaning to their actions. But we treat this explicit formulation as something that
is always possible under certain types of pressure, whether it involves, for exam-
ple, responding to a vivid criticism by an adversary, or to the questioning by a
researcher. Outside the complete explicit formulation, however, these constraints
remain present, notably by the intermediary of the arrangement of objects that
exists in the situation: the material arrangement. The inability to take these con-
straints into consideration is precisely what defines, in our model, the thing com-
mon meaning intends to point to when it draws attention to the abnormal char-
acter of a person considered to be insane, eccentric, or out of her wits. This also
means that we do not ground the possibility of an agreement on the membership
of a group, understood as a condition for sharing a set taken-for-granted cultural
norms and schemes that would be shared implicitly. In other words, the agree-
ment is not based in the this-goes-without-saying of the group, whatever its ori-
4 For an examination of the place of these orders of worth in France and in the USA, and of the
relations with other grammars of the public good, see the survey, supervised by Michele Lamont
and Laurent Thévenot, on the repertories of evaluation in both countries: Lamont & Thévenot
2000, and specifically: Thévenot, Moody &r Lafaye 2000, Moody & Thévenot 2000 and Lamont
2000.
5 The formation of new orders of worth has been analysed in numerous texts following the publi-
cation of On Justification. For a complete analysis and a history of the construction of the con-
nectionist worth 'by project', see: Boltanski and Chiapello 1999; for insights into the construction
of a "green" worth concerning the environment, see: Lafaye & Thévenot 1993, Thévenot 1996,
Thévenot, Moody & Lafaye 2000; on the emergence of a worth of information, see: Thévenot
1997.
211
^ ^ Luc Boltanski <S Laurent Thévenot ~ —
gins: ethnic, regional, class-bound, etc. But there is even more. In the case of jus-
tice, the constructions that take groups and cultures as basic units cannot really
account for an agreement between members of different groups with different cul-
tures and different interests, except in terms of relations of power. Although it is
undoubtedly true that the existence of power relations cannot be ignored, it is
exactly our aim to show that in certain situations justifiable and universalizable
agreements are possible, and that these are capable of resisting their denunciation
as simple power relations under the veil of relations of justice.
We do not ignore the role played by violence in political relations between
people, a role that may vary according to situations, societies and epochs. Simi-
larly, we do not ignore how much routines owe to the body and to corporeal inte-
riorizations. But we do object to the claim that violence and routine can account
for all situations. There are situations, and they are numerous, where persons are
or could be confronted with criticism. The model of orders of worth aims to
establish that in these situations, in order to reach an agreement, one must be
capable of justifying one's self by referring to a principle that is valid for all. Such
agreements are simply necessary to put an end to, or to prevent, a dispute. Of
course, this does not exclude the possibility that these situations will become vio-
lent. Proceeding from a model of competence injustice, however, one cannot but
rule out as irrelevant the situations that abstain from justifications.
The kind of agreement that we are investigating is a problematic and active
agreement. The persons are working to establish a fragile agreement. We stress
the work persons have to accomplish here and now in order to construct the
social world, to endow it with meaning and to confer on it a minimum of firm-
ness. This approach places our research close to the endeavours of phenomeno-
logical sociologies who also pay much attention to the performative activities of
the actors. But our model recognizes types of entities which the phenomenology-
inspired sociologies, focusing on human persons, do not always consider rele-
vant. These entities are, on the one hand, metaphysical beings—and notably what
we call worths—and, on the other hand, objects. Ethnomethodology for example,
addresses all kinds of states of the world that present themselves in the here and
now, and, by methodological decision, accepts no resources that are external to a
situation. The difference from the orders of worth model is that the latter aims to
account for justifiable states, where justification makes an appeal to common
resources that go beyond the situation. The resorting to principles of construction
that transcend the situation enables the identification of the situations and the
selection of arguments and moves that are relevant. This would be an immense
and quasi-impossible task if one were to proceed, like ethnomethodology does,
from a universe in which any being can be engaged in any situation, grasped in
the absolute indetermination of a here and now which is being offered without
any resistance to the free interpretations of the actors.
The competence to make an agreement is not a uniquely linguistic compe-
tence. This competence must allow the formation of arguments that are accept-
able in justice, as well as the construction of assemblies of objects, arrangements
that hold together, the fitness of which can be demonstrated. These arrangements
are necessary in order to test the claims made by the persons. The notion of test
plays a central part in our construction. In opposition to 'the linguistic turn', it
212
— The Reality of Moral Expectations: A Sociology of Situated Judgement —
inclines towards realism. Indeed, for persons to be able to reach an agreement in

practice, not only in principle, a reality test has to take place, accompanied by a
codification or, at least, an explicit formulation of valid proof. In order to be able
to take these proofs into consideration, the model of analysis must be able to
enlighten the presence not only of persons—the sole beings of political philoso-
phy—but also of objects. We do consider the reality test to require the capacity
of persons to take these objects at face value and to endow them with value.
Therefore, every principle of justice is associated with a universe of objects that
constitute a coherent world.
The orders of worth refer to forms of common goods that allow the establish-
ing of an equivalence between entities and, in doing this, to define their relative
worth. At the heart of this competence model lies what we can call a metaphysi-
cal capacity. We consider this capacity to be essential for understanding the pos-
sibility of a social bond. To be able to converge towards an agreement, persons
really have to refer to something which is not of persons and which transcends
them. This common reference we call a principle oj equivalence. To criticize or to
justify, the persons have to extract themselves from the immediate situation and
rise to a level oj generality. Therefore, they turn to seeking a position by relying on
a principle that is valid in all generality.
The first part of our construction involved demonstrating that this metaphys-
ical capacity is presupposed by the social sciences, but that the latter never actu-
ally drew all the conclusions from this. For this, we start from the debate between
Durkheimian sociology and liberal economics, which is a form of the more gen-
eral discussion between holism and individualism. The terms of this controversy
are known: the movements that are connected with the tradition of liberal eco-
nomics criticize Durkheimian sociology because its holism is of an unsound
metaphysical nature. The 'groups' Durkheimian sociology talks about do not
exist. Collectives are artefacts. Only individual persons, endowed with interests,
exist. Durkheim, in turn, establishes the existence of collective realities in the
polemics he shares with liberal economics, a polemics the nature of which is inex-
tricably ethical and scientific. The rational individual of liberal economics is an
egoist (the term is Durkheim's, where he is criticizing individualism), an artefact,
an abstract man, who has no country or history. We acknowledge, in the indi-
vidualist tradition, that the Durkheimian scheme relies on metaphysics. But we
try to show that the construction of a just political bond on the basis of the mar-
ket relation also presupposes a metaphysical stance: persons in the market are not
in the particular state the use of the term 'individual' habitually implies. If they
were plunged into their particularity, they would not have a reason to pursue the
same goods, to agree on pursuing the same goods, and to find themselves in com-
petition for these goods. What we are saying is that the persons in the market are
moral beings, in the sense that they are capable of taking abstraction from their
particularity in order to agree on external goods, which are universally listed and
defined (Thévenot 1989a). We do not consider this underlying metaphysics to be
a defect of the social sciences. It is exactly by resorting to conceptualizations of a
metaphysical nature that the social sciences recognize the role played by the
capacity of human beings to conclude a justifiable agreement in the construction
of society.
213
— Luc Boltonskl <£ Laurent Thévenot " — i
Legitimacy and legitimization
It is this kind of agreement, justified by referring to a principle that transcends

the situation because it claims to be valid in all generality, that we will call a legit-
imate agreement. Indeed, if a person in disagreement sets aside the possibility of
violence and thus renounces imposing herself on others by eliminating her adver-
saries, she has to express her disagreement by relying on arguments. But the argu-
ments on which she relies must refer to an antecedent authority that universally
validates them. In the absence of such an authority, the exchange would be at risk
of becoming an egoistic confirmation ("Why do you tell me this?—Because I like
it") or an ad hominem insult which can turn into a violent argument ("Why do
you tell me this?"—"Because I can't stand your face"). Neither can the arguments
be valid for only a few persons, for example, by stabilizing an arrangement

between the persons that are present. The arguments have to be solid enough to
be able to resist questions of an indeterminate number of new, not yet specified
partners. If these strangers were introduced to the situation, they, in turn, might
demand arguments that already have been brought forward in order to stabilize
the social bond between the participants. In order to make an agreement possi-
ble, attempts at justification have to rely on the hypothesis of common know-
ledge on which proposed arguments and arrangements could rely.
In other words, our work also intends to make a contribution to the clarifica-
tion of what is meant by "legitimacy". This concept, constituting one of the com-
mon references of sociology, is used in more than one sense. Sociology sometimes
considers legitimacy as a necessary component of social action, sometimes as a
licitation after the facts of a coordination obtained by other means, which is to say,
by force: in this case, one often speaks of "legitimization" (when, for example, one
says of a text of law that it is the "legitimization" of a "power relation"). The ambi-
guity of the uses associated with the concept of "legitimate order" has been pre-
sent since its introduction into the repertory of classical sociology by Max Weber
who, in Economy and Society (Weber, 1978), juxtaposes without any attempt at
reconciliation two very different definitions of legitimacy (Corcuff & Lafaye,
1989). When he defines a "legitimate order", Max Weber intends to designate first
and foremost the "validity of an order", the "stability" of which would neither
depend on an orientation of individual actions toward the maximization of "inter-
ests" ("purposive rationality"), nor on the force of "habit", and which would
therefore be irreducible to "simple regularity in the course of social life". This last
remark is important because it allows a clear distinction to be maintained
between what resorts under norm and what under ideal. Post-Weberian sociology
has not stopped abolishing this distinction in order to take from ideals any claim
to reality, bringing them back to either "ideologies" or "objective regularities". But
in the passages dedicated to "domination" in the same work, Weber alters his use
of the term "legitimacy". It now means the justification a posteriori of a relation of
domination: "All dominations seek to arouse and maintain the belief in their
'legitimacy'." In Nietzsche one can find a theory of justification as deception
expressed in almost the same words: "Whatever his situation, man needs value
judgements with which he can justify for his own eyes, and especially for those
of his surroundings, his acts, his intentions and his states; in other words, it is his
214
^ ^ The Reality of Mora! Expectations: A Sociology of Situated Judgement ^ ^
way of glorifying his own self. Every natural morality expresses the satisfaction
which a certain kind of men feels of itself." (Nietzsche 1948, Vol. 1, p. 324). In
the second definition, the legitimate nature of order—which is always arbitrary
by essence, that is, founded in the last instance on one or the other form of vio-
lence, the will to power or resentment—depends on its capacity to make people
believe that it really relies on the ideal to which it appeals. Legitimacy is purely a
matter of belief, and is thus a collectively held illusion. Classical sociology has
mainly remembered the second definition, and, in this case, rather speaks of
"legitimization", leaving legitimacy to such reputedly naive disciplines as law and
political philosophy.
We intend to deal here with legitimacy as part of the competence of actors.
We indeed make the hypothesis that actors are capable of distinguishing between
legitimate arguments and arrangements and illegitimate ones. Legitimate means

that when arguments and arrangements are confronted with criticisms they can
be the subject of justifications that are valid in all generality, and that they can be
used to support universalizable agreements. Illegitimate means that they cannot
be justified, and that they cannot support agreements that concern the generali-
ty of the common good, even if they can be mobilized by the actors in certain sit-
uations to support certain arrangements to the advantage of the parties.
2.The situated sense of the just and theories of justice
This question of the legitimacy of the agreement, which often remains ambiguous
in the frame of sociology, lies at the heart of contemporary theories of justice. Two
figures of agreement are currently opposing each other. One is based on the idea
of a communitarian sense of belonging that draws attention to the weight, put on
the appraisal of the just, of culture or values shared by the members of the same
social whole and forged in a common history. The other considers the agreement
as the result of a liberal procedure that highlights the autonomy of individuals in
their appraisals of what would satisfy them and in their decisions. The view of
justice here claims, above everything else, to remain independent with respect to
traditions, authorities or other sources of influence that would threaten this
autonomy. The first orientation is linked to the recognition of a plurality of defi-
nitions of the good, while the second is interested in defining a minimal proce-
dural space permitting the management of the free and independent choices of
individuals.
Some theories seek to overcome this opposition. This is the case with the con-
structions proposed by John Rawls and Michael Walzer (Rawls, 1974; Walzer,
1983). By reconsidering the requirements put forth in the first and the second
approach, each of these theories proposes an original reconstruction. Rawls intro-
duces into the individual evaluation the demands of reciprocity grasped by the
original position under the veil of ignorance. Walzer intends to show that the "art
of separation" that characterizes liberalism must be understood as a separation of
spheres of justice, and not of individuals. Our model of the sense of justice invites
a similar reconstruction by recognizing the plurality of goods and the injustices
that arise from their confusion, while still being concerned with the demands
resulting from an extension of the common goods to a community of reference,
215
— Luc Boltanskl <£ Laurent Thivenot "™—
which is supposedly without limits. We will try to sketch the instances of con-
vergence and the discrepancies between the model of orders of worth and the the-
ories that we have just mentioned. We will illustrate our argument with examples
from the analysis of social policies.
A major difference stems from our investigating the situated sense oj the just.
The situations that lend themselves to the explicit formulation of what is or is not
the just thing to do are situations where the decision does not impose itself,
where there is no tacit cooperation between acquaintances, nor a violent clash.
These are situations where the participants are driven to explain their judgement
and to support it by drawing from the resources of the present situation. This sit-
uated judgement, in which the concern for justice is caught between the circum-
stances and the reference to principles or rules, notably corresponds to the
moment of applying a regulation, or a policy measure. When the issue of justice

is raised in the theory of justice, by reference to principles or formal procedures,
the moment of application is often relegated to an ulterior step in the investiga-
tion, which is held to be empirical or is raised at the time of the evaluation of the
practical effects of the rule. Our method leads us, inversely, to examine from the
start such moments of putting into practice a policy measure. We would like to
show that tackling justice in practice is not simply the empirical side of a theory
of principle-driven justice. Entering the issue by the situated judgement leads to
the modification of the theoretical models and to the taking into consideration of,
notably, the question of how conventional clues are developed and how common
objects are qualified. Justification relies on these operations. Moreover, when one
pays attention to the moment where a policy is put into practice, it becomes evi-
dent that, beyond the application of a rule, there is a confrontation between dif-
ferent forms of judgement expressed by the different actors implicated in the pol-
icy. Therefore, we are led to reposition the political evaluation of a policy in the
spectrum of evaluations and judgements made by the actors who are implicated
in its implementation. For example, statistical evaluation, adapted to the judge-
ment of political mandataries (Desrosieres 1998), has to be situated in a larger
array of evaluation modes that engage different specifications of what is just. In
this way, a labour inspector can doubt that the "statistical way", which establish-
es equivalence in the sector of the firm, is the appropriate way to evaluate the sit-
uation on a work floor. He will carefully survey other forms of evaluation and
other types of relevant clues, like those that permit the apprehension of a local
custom or of a "deteriorated social climate" (Dodier 1989, p. 302).
The recognition of a diversity of specifications of the just
Is the universalizing view that is associated with the pursuit of a legitimate agree-
ment compatible with the plurality of forms of judgement? Does not the estab-
lishment of a plurality of specifications of the just open the gates to a relativism
of values, of cultures, and even of the implicated interests?
Let us illustrate this problem by means of the social policy of the French
Revenu Minimal d'Insertion (RMI) (Minimal Income for Social Integration). Act-
ing as a safety net, this policy could, at first sight, be interpreted as correspond-
ing well to a communitarian view on justice, especially since it was conceived in
216
^ ^ The Reality of Moral Expectations: A Sociology of Situated Judgement «^—
order to prevent the dissolution of the social bond. Is not solidarity one of the
ideals shared in the societies that promote the welfare state? Nevertheless, ever
since the drafting of the law, the arguments that have been advanced to support
the measure appear to belong to two different orders, depending on the empha-
sis laid on either the right to a minimal allowance or the need for social integra-
tion. And if one examines the moment of application of this measure of social pol-
icy, in accordance with our approach to the issue of justice, it appears that the
diversity of judgements that are implicated in the putting into practice of policies
is even greater. Take, for example, a local integration committee gathering per-
sons who have to make decisions about contracts of integration.6 We see how an
industrialist wonders if one should give RMI to a first-degree-disabled person
who is no longer suitable for employment. We see how a social worker valorizes
the trust one has to put in a man who, having a first-hand experience of a life
associated with alcoholism, and struggling to get out of it, can help others with
the same problems. We see how a mandatory of the Agence Nationale pour l'Em-
ploi (National Agency for Employment) discriminates between an "occasional
welfare recipient" and a "recipient in decline", a "qualified person with conversa-
tional competencies" and a "qualified person sloping down to dequalification", an
"offensive" and a "sharp" or a "cool" person. We see how a subprefect proposes a
course to teach an immigrant worker how to read and write, in order to promote
his successful integration into civil life, and how the industrialist sharply replies
that this means yet another subsidized course for a socio-cultural education cen-
tre, that one can do just fine without knowing how to fill in forms, that there are
functionaries who are meant to do this sort of thing (Astier 1991).
How should we consider this diversity of points of view? Isabelle Astier invites
us to make the following pressing remark. The mentioned exchanges—which are
brief, as the committee passes around 80 dossiers in one morning—differ from
the routine functioning of an administrative service that relies on standard pro-
cedures (Astier 1991, p. 81). Is this not a case where the pragmatic constraints of
discussion, examined in Habermas' theory of communicative action, would be
satisfied (Habermas 1986)? This theory invites us to take seriously the test insti-
gated by this discussion, without, however, illuminating us about the variety of
appraisals of the examined cases made by the participants.
Even if one seeks to recognize more than individual opinions in the uttered
judgements, are we not sliding towards a relativism of value judgements, which
is characteristic of the distance vis-a-vis the notion of justice that is kept in the
social sciences? This distance is not only relativizing, it can also enable a critical
stance. The sociologist or the scientific researcher will be able to show that under
the guise of defending the general interest, the various committee members are
actually clashing with one another over individual or professional interests. If we
do not adopt this way of debunking, it is not because the criticism lacks perti-
nence, but because it joins those of ordinary actors, and because we therefore
need to examine in all generality the underlying view of justice. What is pro-
claimed as an objective contribution from the social sciences bears the traces of
an operation of criticism. By this the sociologist allows indignation in the face of
6 For a more complete chronicle of such a committee, see Astier 1991.
217
^ ^ Luc Bokanski & Laurent Thévenot ~ ™
injustice to seep through, while at the same time placing doubt on the claims to
justice expressed by the actors. It is this sense of justice which is the object of our
research. In order to accomplish a successful exploration, we have to follow the
arguments and criticisms of the actors, instead of doubling them with our own oper-
ations of calling into question.
A pluralism without relativism
As soon as one takes seriously the arguments and the proofs presented in support
of a justification, without reducing them to an ideological mask, one needs to
search for the constraints that weigh on justification, and that are not simply pro-
cedural. This means that we have to look for the way in which people express
injustices by engaging in substantial specifications of what is good (in the pre-

ceding example: productive efficiency, or the esteem that elicits trust).
The method we propose proceeds from the observation that modern societies
have steered away from a globalizing representation which manages to integrate
all differences, and have recognized the existence of a plurality of modes of legit-
imate evaluation. This acknowledged pluralism puts pressure on the actors who,
depending on the situation, have to come to an agreement with different princi-
ples of justice. It is, for that matter, a mistake to interpret the disquiet provoked
within the actors by the recognition of a diversity of evaluation principles as a val-
idation of the reduction to interests to which the social sciences proceed, or of the
nihilist conception of the world that is often associated with this.
This capacity for adjustment is not taken into account by the communitarian
approach that confers value on the social group, nor by the liberal approach that
confers it on the individual. The capacity does not correspond to a conflict of val-
ues of different groups (or to the dominance of one over the others), nor to a
game which, limited to a contractual space, relinquishes values to the subjectivi-
ty of the private sphere. The double observation, first of a diversity in the ways of
justification or criticism, and simultaneously of a capacity of persons to go from
one to the other, incited us to systematically confront the forms of justification
that are in use. Consequently, we could look for the elements of a common model
that would explain the capacity of people to go from one justification to another.
A major result of this confrontation of forms of justification was that we were led
to broaden what is commonly taken to be "justice". We could now cover a vari-
ety of imperatives all of which were able to support common judgements and to
determine the relevance of the proofs that were offered in support of the judge-
ments. It is not simply in the variety of moral values that one has to recognize the
diversity of the specifications of the just, but also in the confrontation of techni-
cal, economic, social and other imperatives. This broadening of the notion of jus-
tice brings into question the asymmetry which is often observed at the heart of
political debates, between the respective treatment of, on one side, the demands
of social justice, and, on the other side, the economic imperatives of efficiency and
competition. The first go back to an ideal that can be represented in the normative
order, the second to the material needs and constraints that are part of systems
analysis. By wrongly associating the normative with an ideal and the systemic
with the real, this opposition creates an asymmetry, notably between politics and
218
^ ^ The Reality of Moral Expectations: A Sociology of Situated Judgement "—•
economics, which leaves little room for the normatively orientated intervention.
One way of getting around this division is to set oneself the requirement to treat
different orders of reality which are all rooted in things, and which are orientat-
ed towards justice, in a similar way. In this way, one can reinterpret the debates
within an organization on the decisions to be taken as a dynamic effort concern-
ing a settlement between the normative demands associated with the different
orders of reality (Thévenot 2001).
The exploration of the sense of justice as it is expressed in situations of injus-
tice leads to highlighting the role of the common objects that are engaged in the
argumentations and that serve as proofs. Argumentative and real constraints are
inextricably interwoven in the regime of justification that we are examining here.
A further reason is provided for a reconsideration of the relations between the
imperatives of social justice and those of efficiency, and for avoiding linking up
the first with principles, while the second would have all the pressure of realism
or the weight of criticism addressed to instrumental rationality (Habermas 1986).
The relations between the view of a common judgement and its being tested by
the medium of things bring together both the requirement of justification and
that of realism. The study of situated justice is aimed at the investigation of the
relations between judgement and action.7 It urges to reposition the demands of
justification from the perspective of the coordination of an action with other
actions. The pursuit of a common judgement characterizes certain modes of coor-
dination (Descombes, ed., 1991). The judgement that aims to be common draws
support from relevant elements that are to be grasped in a general form that lends
itself to drawing persons and things nearer to one another. We have put this way
of grasping persons and things at the heart of our research and have called it qual-
ification. The disputes over qualification take up much space in the articulations
of injustice and illuminate the links between judgement and action.
Qualifying for the test of worth
The approach to situated justice draws attention to the operation that consists of
treating persons in generality, by proceeding to bring people together, by consti-
tuting classes, by characterizing positions and chances etc. This is also the oper-
ation referred to in scientific evaluations that are supposed to select the relevant
elements for a proof, or in the application of a law or a policy measure, which
presupposes a formation that precedes the working of the rule.8 But these regis-
ters often find themselves muddled. Asking whether or not a policy measure is
just will combine several registers: the questions raised by a measure of justice
will in this way combine a juridical qualification of the populations to which the
measure applies, a statistical qualification necessary for the evaluations of the
effects of the measure, as well as the qualification the actors themselves apply to
understand the others in their articulation of injustice. The basis of a right to a
7 On the treatment of action and judgement in the humanities, see the issue of the journal Critique
entitled "Sciences humaines: sens social", edited by Vincent Descombes (Critique, 529-530, June-
July 1991)
8 On the relations with the juridical notion of qualification, and, more generally, on the relations
between ordinary justifications and juridical judgements, see Thévenot 1992, 2000a.
219
^^™ Luc Bo/tansfci & Laurent Thévenot " ^
social security measure will most certainly constitute a qualification that interferes
with those that persons use in their judgement. The result of this is that the effect
of the stigma cannot be detached from that of the right.
In the articulation of the just, the way in which the qualification is attributed
will occupy a central position. One can distinguish between an attribution that
intends to attach the quality to a person, and an attribution that intends to attach
it to a situation. A qualification that is strongly attached to the person will confer
some permanency on the person, but tends to form highly substantialized enti-
ties. This threatens to divide humanity into different fractions and to contradict
the idea of a common humanity that sustains the common sense of justice. The
attachment is extreme in the case of, notably, biological properties that are
deemed gifts of birth. But this kind of attachment is also found in a slightly weak-
er form in the qualification in terms of character. A qualification that is strongly

attached to the situation and to events will, on the contrary, tend to detach the
person from states that, like in the case of roles, are only assumed for the occa-
sion. One procedure of distributive justice that goes a long way in detaching the
qualification from persons and attaching it to the situation is the allocation that
happens through queuing, for example: waiting for your turn in front of a
counter. Such a qualification, which is wholly circumstantial, will be unfit to
function in coordinations of actions with a larger reach. The debates on the
notions of person and subject and their deconstruction might be clarified by the
examination of pragmatic configurations that entail different modes of treating
beings.
Considered improper for legitimate justifications are qualifications that are
not re-evaluated in function of the actions that are situationally realized. But does
the ordinary sense of justice, and the qualities it relies on, and which we have
named "worths", fit with the notion of desert?
Virtue as the excellence of people and objects
Consider now the ancient figure of virtue, understood as success in action, devel-
oped in the arete of Homeric poetry and extended to actions that are no longer
specifically great acts of warriors, characteristic of an aristocratic virtue. It con-
tinues to influence a communitarian approach to justice, in which the success in
action is measured in terms of different models of excellence. Alasdair Maclntyre,
for example, links the notion of "standard of excellence" with that of "practice".
It presupposes that I "accept the authority of those standards and the inadequa-
cy of my own performance as judged by them". He emphasizes that this link rules
out "all subjectivist and emotivist analyses of judgment. De gustibus est dis-
putandum" (Maclntyre 1984, p. 190).
This tradition is interesting for another reason, namely that it has put objects
on the scene, of which we wish to show the position they occupy in the sense of
justice. A conception of virtue that permits the extension to objects contributes
to the dissolution of the Humean opposition between description and evaluation.
Maclntyre gives the example of the watch, the concept of which cannot be
defined independently of the concept of a "good" watch (Maclntyre 1984, p. 58).
If we reposition justification from the perspective of an uncertain coordination of
220
^ ^ The Reality of Moral Expectations: A Sociology of Situated Judgement ^ ^
collective actions, we can see more clearly the place of objects that are generally
qualified in the identification and evaluation of the actions of others. The inclu-
sion of objects in the evaluation of the just distributes qualities beyond the actor.
This inclusion of objects in the good does not presuppose a reference to a repre-
sentational model that compares complete realizations to their ideal-types. It is as
what is said in Plato's Gorges. (506d), i.e. that the proper quality of furniture, as
of the souls, results from "a rule, a norm, an art, adapted to each of these beings".
The critical turn of social roles
Evoking the construction of excellence is useful for situating yet another con-
struction of the qualification. It is widespread in the social sciences, to the point
of constituting one of the most frequent approaches to the question of judgement.

Although the vocabulary of virtue, like that of excellence, is hardly valued there
(except perhaps for "prestige", as excellence from reputation), there are abundant
references to "roles" in virtue of which the action is performed. As Maclntyre
remarks, one can situate this notion of role in the line of that of virtue understood
as excellence. It also has affinity with the notion of "character", anchored in liter-
ature, and he considers that "characters are the masks worn by moral philoso-
phies" and that they place "moral constraint on the personality of those who
inhabit them" (Maclntyre 1984, pp. 27-28). These characters are developed in the
sociological literature on "occupational roles", which holds a central position in the
sociology of "professions". But Maclntyre notices the difference between a "char-
acter", which helps the actors to understand and evaluate the others, and a "role",
which fits in an institutional frame. In this movement of moral philosophy
towards the social sciences, the qualification tends to become arbitrary, as it also
is with values. Referring to Nietzsche, and calling into question the "grandiose
pathos of the Christian ethics", Weber sees in the adherence to values the
implacable clashes between personal points of view (Weber 1959, pp. 93-95).
In the critical position that the social sciences hold concerning judgements,
statuses and roles are qualifications that permit the forming of expectations about
the social interventions of others. But they are marked as arbitrary if compared to
an authenticity of individuals (as in the writings of Goffman), or considered as
instruments in the hands of strategists. In opposition to the substantial identity
that attaches the quality to the person, the role tends to be assumed as a panoply,
which the person would find wholly prepared when entering a situation and
which would enable him to execute a programme of action without engaging his
responsibility as a person. The distance from the role, which is at the same time
cynical in the actor's mind and critical in the analysis of Goffman, helps to break
down the relation between action and qualification, leading, in the opposite
direction of desert, to a complete fusion. This distance is characteristic of the sta-
tus of the just in the social sciences: retracted from the disenchanted object, it
remains buried in the critical gaze of the researcher.
Row/s' critique of the notion of desert
Rawls' critique of the model of excellence does not coincide with the one that has
221
• ™ Luc Bokanski <£ Laurent Thévenot ^^™
been forged in the social sciences, because it aims at reconstructing a positive

demand of justice. The calling into question of the notion of desert is at the heart
of Rawls' construction, and undoubtedly helps to better appreciate its originality
and its differing from common sense (Rawls 1974, 48, pp. 310-315). Vigorously
opposing the relation between justice, happiness and excellence, which is the
core of the aforementioned tradition, it intends to substitute this with the notion
of legitimate expectation. The differences that help to qualify persons are brought
back to the mode of a factual judgement; the point of view of the just will bear
exclusively on the distribution of benefits. He supports his criticism with an
example purporting to undermine the foundations of a notion of intrinsic value.
In a market economy, he notes, the value of the productive contribution of an
individual will depend on the labour market as well as on the goods market. So,
the moral value of an individual could not depend on these external elements.
This illustration is interesting for our argument, because the worth that we see
operating in justifications is also not considered as an intrinsic value.
Rawls' critique of the notion of desert leads him to draw a distinction between
the just character of a distribution of a good among situations, positions and
chances, and differentiations of positions and chances that are, to the extent that
they are treated as natural inequalities or as facts, in accordance with economic
constraints especially. This separation hides the fact that the worth of efficiency,
on which the economic reasoning relies, is constructed on the same model as the
other orders of worth. Furthermore, it cannot account for the conflicts of orders
of worth that manifest themselves in the articulations of injustice. But above all,
it ruptures the link between justice and action that we are interested in shedding
light on. It is the taking into consideration of this link which leads us to an
approach to the just via the pragmatic demands of acting with others. That is why
we pay attention to the operation of qualification that appears to us to be previous
to the differentiation of the "social goods" that are to be distributed.
3.The orders of worth in legitimate criticisms and justifications
The legitimate qualifications: order and common humanity
The operation of qualification indeed is a condition for the distribution of "social

goods", which is most often the focus of theories of justice. The qualification
characterizes and orders the states (situations, positions, and chances) of persons
and things. Nevertheless, numerous forms of appraisal perform well-ordered
characterizations without convening in a common judgement. Take, for instance,
the above-mentioned characterization that distinguished between "offensive" and
"cool" persons. Legitimate qualifications must, in addition, satisfy the demand of
"common humanity". We situate this demand above and beyond the expression
of equality aimed at by the order of civic worth and the solidarity that supports
it. As Hannah Arendt noted, one of the problems posed by the application of
human rights is that they have been thought out in the frame of citizenship and
have been confused with the rights of the citizen. Civic solidarity transgresses the
limits of a nation (bearing witness to this is a concern for solidarity with the Third
World), but its equipment is essentially limited to national institutions, with the
222
"™" The Reality of Moral Expectations: A Sociology of Situated Judgement ——
exception of some elements of international law. The demand of common

humanity has been translated by Rawls into the imaginary arrangement of the veil
of ignorance. He sought to reconcile a Kantian view of universalization, or of an
impartial spectator, with a notion of the interested individual.
It is clear that this main component of the idea of justice is not universal, even
if it aims at universalization. One can retrace its historical and cultural limits. This
is in a sense what Rawls' critics have urged him to do. Consequently, he has mod-
ified his initial formulations and now recognizes that he had proposed a theory
for a modern, democratic society (Rawls 1988). The notion of reflective equilib-
rium already presupposes this anchoring in the community of reading citizens to
whom Rawls submitted his arguments. But this does not imply that certain com-
munitarian positions are taken up, as one sees in Rawls' formulation of principles.
In the same vein, our exploration of the ordinary sense of justice uncovers cer-
tain demands that are common to the different orders of worth, but that are
remote from mere custom or a communitarian morality.9
The two demands of order and of common humanity put limits on the qual-
ifications that can constitute the orders of worth. The search for an articulation
between these two is at the heart of the ordinary sense of justice. We have demon-
strated in our work that a similar type of articulation was at the basis of different
classical constructions of political philosophy. The disquiet about the justification
of inequalities bears witness to the constant re-actualization of the tension
between an order implied in the coordination of actions performed in communi-
ty, and the reference to a common humanity.10
Some convergences between the model shared by the different orders of worth
and the second principle of Rawls are interesting to note, because the paths we
have taken are very different. In the demands that weigh on the orders of worth,
we find a figure of common good (the worth of the great benefits the small) that
eliminates certain types of evaluations and ranges of positions and chances, as
well as a demand of keeping positions and chances of worth open by the possi-
bility of putting them to the test. In order not to disrupt the idea of common
humanity, the worths cannot be permanently attached to persons, but have to
undergo re-evaluations in the course of actions that put them to the test. In this
way they have to re-establish the proof of benefit to the common good. A major
source of the sentiment of injustice is caused by the existence of advantages that
are wholly detached from tests that could justify them. This is so in the case of
criticism of power that would not be legitimated by sources of authority. Next to
the criticisms about the inequalities of worths one has to add the criticisms of the
fact that they are not re-evaluated.
9 See Ronald Dworkin's critique on the communitarian moralism of Lord Devlin, and his references
to Burke (Dworkin 1978, Chapter 10).
10 When the proof of this benefit is not given, the "less worthy" are in a (justified) position to
denounce their exploitation by the "more worthy", and to invert the maxim by dedicating them-
selves to demonstrating that it is the state of the "less worthy" that makes up the happiness of the
"more worthy" (Boltanski & Chiapello 2000).
223
™— Luc Boltanski £ Laurent Th&venot ^ ^
Rawls' difference principle stipulates that social and economic inequalities

must be to the greatest benefit of the least advantageous members of society. Pro-
ceeding from a situation that is unequal de facto, and without the legitimacy of
these inequalities being able to form the object of criticism, the method that
allows calling into question the distribution of positions and chances is excluded
by construction. At the same time, the question of legitimacy is reduced to a cal-
culus of which one refuses to see the preceding calculations. The other principle
of Rawls' theory stipulates the free access to unequal positions and chances: the
social and economic inequalities must be attached to functions and positions that
are open to all under conditions of fair equality of chances. This generalization of
the argument of equality of chance, however, omits to ask questions about the
validity of the test which is, in the model of the orders of worth, the principal
object of criticisms.
The two lines of argument deviate from one another in the way that common
humanity weighs on the range of positions and chances. In Rawls' theory, the
inequalities are factual givens and the author particularly refers to the productive
inequalities in efficiency. The idea of justice does not intervene in their construc-
tion. In the orders of worth, on the other hand, the range of position and chances
are not deemed to be factual and external to the question of justice. The sense of
the just weighs on the type of quality that is taken into account in the justifica-
tions, as well as on their attribution. The difference between the two models is
apparent in the treatment of gifts, or talents considered as acquired by birth. For
Rawls, a distribution could very well rely on such differences as long as the
unequal distribution augments the endowment of "the most disadvantaged".
Conversely, the justifications that we have examined cannot rely on such quali-
ties. These justifications are supported by qualities that have to be changeable in
the light of actions that occur. This does not mean that these qualities are absent
from the ordinary appraisals, but that the justifications rely on other variables that
are not so rigidly attached to the person. The sense of the just intervenes as soon
as the qualities, of which the unequal distribution is called into question, are con-
structed.
The demand of common humanity does not only perform a selection that
excludes illegitimate qualifications, like those implied by eugenics (Thévenot
1990a). It is again found in the request for re-actualization of the qualifications
and their being put to the test. The attention paid to this operation, which is
never taken into account in theories of justice, draws us closer to the theories of
action and judgement. The qualification is a test that engages objects and arrange-
ments that are coherent with the orders of worth and which serve in the evalua-
tion of the just. Technical objects, the resources of economic activity, and market
goods are thus reinserted into orders and modes of coordination, and our analy-
sis of specifications of the just leads to an analysis of the different forms of coor-
dination that constitute the tissue of organizations (Thévenot 1989, 2001).
Besides the judgement in terms of efficiency (the worth of industry), or of competi-
tion (the worth of market), evaluations concerning trust (the worth of home), gener-
al interest (the worth of citizenship), opinion (the worth of fame) and creativity (the
worth of inspiration) support a variety of modes of coordination that correspond to
as many ways of specifying the just by a worth (Boltanski & Thévenot 1991).
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"^™ The Reality of Moral Expectations: A Sociology of Situated Judgement —
Critical relations and organization of compromise
Rawls' theory of justice prompts reasoning on a unified range of positions and

chances, in order to define, especially, "the most disadvantaged". More generally,
the examination of the inequalities tends to constitute a single scale that piles up
the inequalities of different kinds. In another sense, the liberal approach con-
tributes to the integration of the subjective expressions of the just and, to avoid
the heteronomy of values, to the unification of the issue of justice in a contractu-
al space. This space is in more than one respect adjusted to a principal coordina-
tion by market competition.
The method of Michael Walzer constitutes a clear-cut break with these
approaches to justice. It seeks to take into account a diversity of spheres of justice,
and opposes solutions that aim at their systematic integration. This differentiation
permits him to distinguish a source of injustice that escapes the attention of other
theorists, though it occupies a very important position in the expressions of injus-
tice that we ourselves have observed. This injustice is the result of a contamina-
tion of one sphere of justice by another. On this important point we adopt the
same approach as Walzer,11 but we differ in the way we look at the plurality of
specifications of the just. For Walzer, the spheres are institutions of varying size
(market, educational institutions, families, etc.). These institutions are in such a
plurality that one cannot see how the dispute can be framed when it involves sev-
eral spheres, and how one can respond to the demand of integration of these
spheres in a society. This results in the following alternatives: either promote the
isolation of one sphere in relation to the others—which would seem to be utopi-
anism—or abstain from a dispute which one cannot solve, except by using force.
And how can, in addition, the characterization in terms of institutions permit the
recognition of the "integrity" of these specifications of the just, their "internal
logic", their capacity to frame a dispute and lead to a judgement (Walzer 1984)?
Entering the matter through 'institutions' tends to limit each specification to
a particular community to fellows that are caught in the same system of rules. We
rather searched for an elementary unit of analysis that would not be an institu-
tion, but a mode of justification. Institutions and organizations were then treated
as arrangements of different kinds that necessitate the integration of a plurality of
imperatives. We also made an effort to account for demands that were common
to all orders of worth, by formulating the common grammar of these orders, cer-
tain elements of which we compared to Rawls' theory of justice.
The orders of worth find themselves in a relation of critique to one another.
Transporting one onto the other is denounced as injustice. Considered as unjust
is the fact that people draw advantage from one worth in the test of another: the
executive who owes his or her position less to competence than to relations, the
creator who gets his or her worth less from the genius of the work than from a
media campaign, the candidate who owes his or her success to the advantages
that his or her financial means gave her, etc. We have here a fundamental matrix
for very changeable expressions of injustice (corruption, inauthenticity, privi-
11 This convergence stems from a shared reference to Pascal's Pensees, which presents tyranny as a
desire for domination outside of its order, in a society with several orders.
225
—• Luc Boltanski & Laurent Thévenot ^ ^
lege), that are raised by a worth that rubs off on a test of another nature. The
unjustifiable inequalities result from the undue extension of the weight of wealth,
or of opinion, or of authority. The threat is, in fact, that of a unique and rigid
order, in which all worths would be superposed and rendered inflexible, cumu-
lating advantages and handicaps.
Nevertheless, none of these orders of worth can assure a coordination on its
own, and thus cannot assure a judgement that can impose itself on the others.
The pursuit of compromise that allows the tensions between several orders to be
overcome is at the heart of the functioning of organizations, whether economic
organizations (combining at least the orders of market and industry) or political
ones (including at least the order of citizenship). Composite arrangements or
human intermediaries foster the crossing from one order to another (Eymard-
Duvemay & Marchal 1997).
4.The limits of the demand of justice in the treatment as a person
The general treatment of persons that is implied in the idea of justice resembles,
in certain aspects, the ordinary treatment of objects. When we compare the state
of different persons, as is presupposed in the idea, or when we consider one and
the same person at different moments, the situation is of the order of "memete"
(sameness, under a relation that specifies the qualification), and not of "ipseite"
(selfhood), to take the distinction Paul Ricoeur made in Soi-meme comme un autre
(Oneself as Another, Ricoeur 1990). This treatment, close to that of objects, will
create a tension with the understanding of a person that is involved in the main-
tenance of self during a course of action or during a certain history. Although we
focus here on the regime of justification, we feel it is not possible to raise the issue
without mentioning the limits, to which we turn in the last section. The repeat-
ed judgement, albeit just, tends to disintegrate the person. Other ways of treating
people avoid this threat, whether they proceed from a deliberated suspension of
judgement, like in the regime of agape (or love) (Boltanski 1990), or from a/amil-
iarity of personal reasons that do not demand the generalization of the judgement
(Thévenot 1990b). The attention paid to the operation of qualification has the
merit of recalling this tension between persons-as-understood-from-predefined-
positions-and-chances and the persons themselves.
The persons disintegrated by the judgement
The demand of justice, and in particular the concern for the putting to the test of
orders of worth, leads to the multiplication of the occasions of the general judge-
ment. The repeated uttering of judgements of this type runs the risk of disinte-
grating the person, especially where the qualifications that support them must
avoid directly regarding the person. One can observe this in the administrative
journeys unemployed people or beneficiaries of RMI must undertake, successions
of going through tests, through assessments of health or of social and profession-
al competence, diagnostic reports of the ANPE (National Agency for Employ-
ment), etc. The confusion resulting from the constant prolonging of the judge-
ment about the self manifests itself in the request that one be treated as a person,
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— The Reality of Moral Expectations: A Sociology of Situated Judgement —
in order to be able to recognize oneself again in the tests, a request that is often
expressed in terms of "hospitality" or "being listened to".12 The evidence of a per-
sonal identity is corroded by the repetition of the qualifications that are assumed
and that threaten to harm the maintenance of the self. When a person who is
looking for a job (and nowadays, even persons who have a job; Boltanski & Chi-
apello 1999) is dragged from judgement to judgement, constantly summoned to
prove himself or herself—even if he or she were to be offered all possible
chances—this is not likely to give stability to that person. This has to do with the
fact that a lot of tests are artificial, in the sense that they are not done with real
worth in mind (Boltanski 1990). Furthermore, because of the pragmatic limits of
a common judgement, the justificatory proofs are necessarily conventional.
The respect for plurality is a central element of justice, because it is one of the
conditions for maintaining selfhood as a person. Completely enlocked in one

worth, it does not have any relations to itself other than those of sameness. It is
exactly this plurality that is lacking with those of whom one ordinarily only sees
the faults in terms of the exclusion from labour or, more generally, from a com-
munity. Associations can cover, like prostheses do, the shrinking of the known
worlds, by offering benefits to persons so that they may reintegrate themselves
into worlds that are no longer accessible to them in the normal course of their
lives. These are places suitable for modes of treatment of others that are
favourable to the maintaining of self-esteem where this is threatened by the
judgement (Pollak 1990).
The vocabulary of the contract and the autonomy of the person
In the social policies that encounter the demands of treating someone as a per-
son, the vocabulary of the contract tends to replace the one of the rule. Nowa-
days, this vocabulary is extended well beyond the juridical engagement of free
wills in a convention: pedagogical contract, integration contract, contract by
objective, etc. As one can see in the matrix of the market as well as in that of law,
the contract constitutes a subject: the contractor. One could, of course, ask if, by
putting forward the demands of such a subject, the figure of the contract does not
seem to enhance the threats of an objectifying treatment that brings persons clos-
er to things.
We would rather highlight the limits of this figure of contract in the treatment
of the person, limits connected with the underlying model of the contractor's
action, as it is reduced to a decision. It is such a model that is put forward by the
social measures that seek to assure the autonomy of choice, against dependence
and subordination that would accompany a benefit. The maintaining of person-
hood does not result from a model of action understood as decision or choice,
because this model considers the maintaining as already acquired.
If it is extended well beyond its juridical anchoring, the vocabulary of contract
muddles the limits that separate the demand of justice from other forms of treat-
ing other people. Doing so, the contract can serve to speak of an involvement (as
12 Quote from: Rapport sur Vamelioration de la vie quotidienne des demandeurs d'emploi (Report on the
improvement of the daily life of those who are looking for a job), p. 33.
227
•"•"« Luc Boltamki & Laurent Th&venot ^ ^
opposed to "1 have nothing to do with this") that allows another person to
attribute a series of actions to the same subject. But is it not a relation of famil-
iarity, totally different from the regime of contract, which is engaged with a
"tutor" or a "catalyst"? One can observe this from the difficulty that social work-
ers encounter in "publicly accounting for a relation that has been installed for a long
time with a person or with the family in question, and trying to translate it in terms of
integration" (Astier 1991, p. 66). Friendship is not a way of treating the other that
is congruent with juridical forms. Daumat already claimed that "friendship is not
ruled by civil laws", and Carbonnier, in his exploration of "non-droif (non-law),
reacts against Lacroix' formula, according to which law is organized friendship:
friendship, he writes, involves a will to keep oneself out of law. Otherwise, friends
would found "an association, a fellowship according to law", and this could quite
well mean the end of their friendship (Carbonnier 1988). The demand of con-
ventional clues involved in the contract is rejected as "legal mumbo jumbo" by
the social workers who seek to understand a person in her own history.
In its most radical form, this rejection is manifested in the renouncing of all
judgement, in favour of a treatment in the regime of agape (love) (Boltanski
1990). In this regime of love, relations are pacified by the fact that persons set
aside the need for equivalence and, by doing so, make a calculus very difficult, if
not impossible. In the Christian tradition, the idea of agape is constructed in
opposition to that of justice because the latter relies, precisely, on the possibility
of a calculus. Without a calculus, it is impossible to make the account, to bring
together what I have given and what I have received. One of the interesting prop-
erties of this regime is that persons in it manifest a preference for the present.
Having put aside any form of equivalence, the past is not kept in the form of debts
and is only feebly remembered. As to the future, it will be conceived as a plan that
must be executed, but will appear, at the moment, in the form of hope. And why
is the past only weakly remembered? Because, once the calculus is set aside, the
sharp criticisms that seek to see justice rendered can no longer take form. Justice
is always retrospective. Justice looks back. In agape, persons are established in the
present without trying to control constantly the gains or losses of each person.
5. Conclusion
The exploration of the sense of the just has not only brought to the surface a plu-
ralism that a theory of justice must account for if it wants to grasp the critical rela-
tions that exist between different specifications of the just. It has also demon-
strated that the pluralism of the just has not led to a relativism of values. This is
connected to the fact that the justifiable, as we see it in ordinary disputes, is rea-
sonable. This reasonableness is expressed not only by the argumentative con-
straints tied to the view of a common judgement, but also by the fact that the rea-
sonable is anchored in a reality test. The inclusion of objects that are qualified in
community, and that are necessary to render proof, closely links discursive
demands of communication with demands of action and of coordination, which
are themselves framed by the recognition of cognitive limits.
The Weberian distinction between irrational forms of authority and a bureau-
cratic authority that preserves the monopoly of reason is disappearing. What is
228
~™ The Reality of Moral Expectations: A Sociology of Situated Judgement ^ ^
also disappearing is the solidity of the opposition between values that lead to sub-
jective appraisals and facts that impose themselves outside of the operation of
judgement. Even invoking efficiency in judgements does not solely rely on the
laws of functioning of a system, but also on a form of construction of a common
good.
The appeal to a common good renders illegitimate the pursuit of causes
beyond the circumscribed space in which one can appeal to justifications and put
them to the test. But at the same time, it also limits the extending of measures one
has to take in order to put an end to an injustice. Conversely, a systemic approach
allows the modelling of a chain of causes, but it excludes the taking into account
of the justifications given by persons. It also excludes from view a reference to a
common good. The tension between these two approaches reflects the dilemma
persons are confronted with in their efforts to construct interpretations of the

world that are capable of satisfying their search for justice.
* Translated from the French by Jo Smets
CV Laurent Thévenot is professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris) and direc-
tor of the Groupe de Sociologie Politique et Morale. His publications include: De la Justification (with
Luc Boltanski, 1991), Rethinking Comparative Cultural Sociology: Repertoires of Evaluation in France and
the United States (with Michèle Lamont, 2000), Les objets dans l'action (with Bernard Conein and
Nicolas Dodien 1993); Cognition et information en société (with Bernard Conein, 1997). E-mail:
Thévenot@ehess.fr
CV Luc Boltanski is professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris) and founder of
the Groupe de Sociologie Politique et Morale. His publications include: L'amour et la justice comme
competences (1990), De la Justification (with Laurent Thévenot 1991), Distant suffering; Morality, medias
and politics, ([1993] 1999), Le nouvel esprit du capitalisme (with Eve Chiapello, 1999). E-mail:
boltansk@ehess.fr
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231

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Taking the sense of justice seri-

I .Taking the sense of justice seriously

208 Philosophical Explorations • N r 3 • September 2000 • 208-231

The modelling of competencies

rule-setting, of determination of different types of common good, and of legiti-

sociological constructions necessarily bring into account, develop a tension with

inclines towards realism. Indeed, for persons to be able to reach an agreement in

Legitimacy and legitimization

It is this kind of agreement, justified by referring to a principle that transcends

be valid for only a few persons, for example, by stabilizing an arrangement

legitimate arguments and arrangements and illegitimate ones. Legitimate means

2.The situated sense of the just and theories of justice

moment of applying a regulation, or a policy measure. When the issue of justice

The recognition of a diversity of specifications of the just

6 For a more complete chronicle of such a committee, see Astier 1991.

A pluralism without relativism

injustices by engaging in substantial specifications of what is good (in the pre-

Qualifying for the test of worth

er form in the qualification in terms of character. A qualification that is strongly

Virtue as the excellence of people and objects

The critical turn of social roles

of constituting one of the most frequent approaches to the question of judgement.

Row/s' critique of the notion of desert

been forged in the social sciences, because it aims at reconstructing a positive

3.The orders of worth in legitimate criticisms and justifications

The legitimate qualifications: order and common humanity

The operation of qualification indeed is a condition for the distribution of "social

exception of some elements of international law. The demand of common

Rawls' difference principle stipulates that social and economic inequalities

Critical relations and organization of compromise

Rawls' theory of justice prompts reasoning on a unified range of positions and

Duvemay & Marchal 1997).

4.The limits of the demand of justice in the treatment as a person

The persons disintegrated by the judgement

conditions for maintaining selfhood as a person. Completely enlocked in one

The vocabulary of the contract and the autonomy of the person

persons are confronted with in their efforts to construct interpretations of the

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