Though much attention has been paid to different principles of justice, far less has been done reflecting on what the larger concern behind the notion is. In this work, Mathias Risse proposes that the perennial quest for justice is about ensuring that each individual has an appropriate place in what our uniquely human capacities permit us to build, produce, and maintain, and is appropriately respected for the capacity to hold such a place to begin with. Risse begins by (...) investigating the role of political philosophers and exploring how to think about the global context where philosophical inquiry occurs. Next, he offers a quasi-historical narrative about how the notion of distributive justice identifies a genuinely human concern that arises independently of cultural context and has developed into the one we should adopt now. Finally, he investigates the core terms of this view, including stringency, moral value, ground and duties of justice. (shrink)

Situating medical and scientific research within a framework or theory of social justice is long overdue. Attempting to extend principles of research ethics beyond the clinic and lab to other affected people or consequences tolerates or obfuscates injustice. While it must be done, the timescales, methodologies, and commitment to real-world impact are quite different in research ethics versus political philosophy.

ABSTRACT Every social order depends on a pathway to atonement for those who breach behavioral expectations. However, observers from a variety of fields now agree that the United States has entered an age of non-apology, where the two words “I’m sorry” simply cannot be said, particularly by powerful men facing allegations of sexual misconduct. This essay draws attention to, and comments upon, this trend. We first identify the sociopolitical factors that have inaugurated the era of non-apology, namely growing political polarization. (...) We then explain the consequences of this shift in societal expectations surrounding apology. This state of affairs, which associates genuine apology with emasculation and defeat, is harmful: it foments a toxic culture that will not allow redress for survivors of sexual assault and harassment; and it provides no answers to complex questions of how society can address the guilt of those who engage in sexual misconduct. (shrink)

This book takes bold steps in forming much-needed philosophical foundations for restorative justice through deconstructing and reconstructing various models of thinking. It challenges current debates through the consideration and integration of various disciplines such as law, criminology, philosophy and human rights into restorative justice theory, resulting in the development of new and stimulating arguments. Topics covered include the close relationship and convergence of restorative justice and human rights, some of the challenges of engagement with human rights, (...) the need for the recognition of the teachings of restorative justice at both the theoretical and the applied level, the Aristotelian theory on restorative justice, the role of restorative justice in schools and in police practice and a discussion of the humanistic African philosophy of Ubuntu. With international contributions from various disciplines and through the use of value based research methods, the book deconstructs existing concepts and suggests a new conceptual model for restorative justice. This unique book will be of interest to academics, researchers, policy-makers and practitioners. (shrink)

Frege’s claim that proper names have senses has come to seem untenable following Kripke’s argument that names are rigid designators. It is commonly thought that if names had senses, their referents would vary with circumstances of evaluation. The article defends Frege’s claim by arguing that names have word-reflexive senses. This analysis of names’ senses does not violate Kripke’s noncircularity condition, and it differs crucially from related views of Bach and Katz. That names have reflexive senses confirms Frege’s own solution to (...) his puzzle about the content of identity sentences, solves Kripke’s Pierre and Peter puzzles about belief ascription, and entails that bearerless names have meanings. Furthermore, names’ having reflexive senses explains why they designate rigidly. (shrink)

In this book the practical dimension of social justice is explained using the analysis and discussion of a variety of well-known topics. These include: the relation between theory and practice in normative political philosophy; the issue of justice under uncertainty; the question of whether we can and should unmask social injustices by means of conspiracy theories; the issues of privacy and the right to privacy; the issue of how certain psychological states may affect our moral obligations, in (...) particular the obligation to treat others fairly; and finally the concepts of morality, fairness, and self-deception. The primary goal of the book is to provide readers with an updated discussion of some important and practical social justice issues. These issues are presented from a new perspective, based on the author ́s research. It is hoped that bringing these topics together in a single book will promote the emergence of new insights and challenges for future research. Juha Räikkä is a professor at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Turku, Finland. His research focuses on ethics and political philosophy. (shrink)

Truth Be Told explains how truth and falsity result from relations that sentences and their constituents have to the circumstances at which they are evaluated. It offers a precise analysis of truth and a diagnosis of the Liar paradox. Current semantic theory employs generalized quantifiers as the extensions of noun phrases. The book provides simpler extensions for noun phrases. These permit intuitive compositions of truth-values and a diagnosis of the Liar and Grelling paradoxes.

Theoreticians of names are currently split into two camps: Fregean and Millian. Fregean theorists hold that names have referent-determining senses that account for such facts as the change of content with the substitution of co-referential names and the meaningfulness of names without bearers. Their enduring problem has been to state these senses. Millian theorists deny that names have senses and take courage from Kripke's arguments that names are rigid designators. If names had senses, it seems that their referents should vary (...) among possible worlds. However, the Millians have the enduring problem of explaining the apparent cognitive content of names. I argue that Mill's original theory, when purged of confusion, provides word-reflexive senses for names. Frege failed to notice senses of this particular sort. Moreover, it is these senses that account for names' rigid designation. When the views of Mill and Frege are understood as complementary, the problems that have faced the divided theorists of names vanish. (shrink)

Artificial Intelligence and algorithms are increasingly able to replace human workers in cognitively sophisticated tasks, including ones related to justice. Many governments and international organizations are discussing policies related to the application of algorithmic judges in courts. In this paper, we investigate the public perceptions of algorithmic judges. Across two experiments (N = 1,822), and an internal meta-analysis (N = 3,039), our results show that even though court users acknowledge several advantages of algorithms (i.e., cost and speed), they trust (...) human judges more and have greater intentions to go to the court when a human (vs. an algorithmic) judge adjudicates. Additionally, we demonstrate that the extent that individuals trust algorithmic and human judges depends on the nature of the case: trust for algorithmic judges is especially low when legal cases involve emotional complexities (vs. technically complex or uncomplicated cases). (shrink)

The article discusses a fundamental problem that has to be faced if the general capability approach is to be developed in the direction of a theory of justice: the selection and justification of a list of capabilities. The democratic solution to this problem (defended by Amartya Sen) is to leave the selection of capabilities to a process of democratic deliberation, while the philosophical solution (defended by Martha Nussbaum) is to establish this list of capabilities as a matter of philosophical (...) theory. The article investigates the debate between these two different positions and argues in favour of the philosophical solution. First, it distinguishes political from epistemological reasons for (not) making capability lists. Second, it shows that the democratic position must incorporate at least some philosophical theorising in general and a theory of democracy in particular. Third, the article argues that the democratic position presupposes that the philosophical position will bypass the democratic process while actually it does not. The philosophical position is actually more respectful of democracy than the democratic position. Fourth, while philosophers may exercise caution and connect their capability lists to actual democratic debates and other empirical sources, this kind of epistemological virtue ironically may heighten the chance of receiving reproaches on the political level. (shrink)

This paper examines the intrinsic relation between institutions and social justice. Its starting point is that processes of institutionalization invoke societal groups to articulate justice demands which, in their turn, give rise to processes of institutional redesign. In liberal democracies, demands for justice are articulated as a pursuit for emancipation and empowerment of groups that feel excluded by dominant categorizations. The imminent presence of this twin pursuit for justice can be explained by the conceptual inconsistencies that (...) characterize the distinction between the public and private sphere. These inconsistencies also explain why demands for emancipation and empowerment are intrinsically ambiguous and inconsistent. In order to reconsider the question how institutions are to be adapted to allow for social justice while acknowledging the plurality, ambiguity and volatility of justice demands, the paper will propose an empirical and normative research agenda. (shrink)

This article considers whether any interpretation of the idea of equal claims to the natural world can resolve the Canyon Dilemma (i.e. can justify protecting the Grand Canyon but not a small canyon from mining by a poor generation). It first considers and ultimately rejects the idea of subjecting natural resource rights to an intergenerational equal division. It then demonstrates that a pluralist theory of environmental justice committed to both respect for the separateness of persons and to the collective (...) good can justify a type of intergenerational non-absolute equal division of natural resource rights that can navigate the Canyon Dilemma. (shrink)

The author contributes debate to the distributive injustices such as low pay, inferior healthcare and housing, as well as diminished opportunities in schools, which continue to blight the lives of millions of urban poor in America and beyond.

Faced with the ongoing tragedy of poverty in our world today, many have long called for a common standard of global justice. Such a standard should not be tied to any one particular strand of justice conceptualizations and it should yet be in harmony with the central motivating beliefs of the various concerned moral worldviews. The article reframes global justice thinking by approaching a core problem, namely motivating people to care for distant needy strangers, in a concrete (...) intercultural manner: it sets out to study and compare the motivational underpinnings for an expansion of social justice, in an exemplary fashion, within two long-standing worldview traditions, namely Christian social ethics and contemporary Confucian ethics, in order to gain a more realistic impression of what a commonly shared and motivationally backed notion of global justice may look like. While the former expresses a universal concern for the poor, the latter has recently attracted interest, since Southeast Asian countries managed to lift millions of people out of abject poverty. As both traditions consider loving communal relationships to constitute the foundation of all justice considerations, the article inquires how this quest shapes each tradition’s way to motivate their adherents’ compliance with a vision of global justice. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that individuals are, prior to the existence of just institutions requiring that they do so, bound as a matter of global distributive justice to restrict their use, or share the benefits fairly of any use beyond their entitlements, of the Earth’s capacity to absorb greenhouse gases (EAC) to within a specified justifiable range. As part of the search for an adequate account of climate morality, I approach the task by revisiting, and drawing inspiration from, (...) two prominent models from classical political philosophy for thinking about norms (rights, permissions, limits, etc.) regarding “pre-institutional” appropriation of unowned resources; Locke and Kant, respectively. The basic resources they develop—connected to fundamental norms of equality and rights to self-preservation and freedom—in order to generate their particular schema for distributive shares prior to the existence of just institutions can be usefully and plausibly connected up with the scarce, valuable, rival, non-excludable, global, and unowned resource that is EAC in order to undergird a picture of individual climate duties in the contemporary world. It is a picture that comes with some fairly radical implications, especially for the well-off. (shrink)

An increasingly popular approach to global justice claims we should be ‘integrationist,’ where integrationism represents an attempt to unify our theorising between different domains of global politics. These political theorists have argued that we cannot identify plausible principles in one domain, such as climate justice, which are not sensitive to general moral concerns. This paper argues we ought to reject the concept of integrationism. It shows that integrationism is either trivial, or it obscures relevant disagreement by ignoring the (...) distinctive methodological and substantive commitments held by its opponents. The paper then argues that the relevant disagreement is actually about the role of practices for political philosophy and, as such, should be framed in terms of the distinction between practice-dependent and practice-independent theory. Finally, I provide my own account of that distinction, identifying a practice-dependent claim that those concerned about the narrowness of prominent accounts of global justice should target. (shrink)

In this book, Eric Havelock presents a challenging account of the development of the idea of justice in early Greece, and particularly of the way justice changed as Greek oral tradition gradually gave way to the written word in a literate society. He begins by examining the educational functions of poets in preliterate Greece, showing how they conserved and transmitted the traditions of society, a thesis adumbrated in his earlier book Preface to Plato. Homer, he demonstrates, has much (...) to say about justice, but since that idea is nowhere in the epics directly stated or expressed, it must be deduced from the speech and actions of the characters. Havelock's careful reading of the Iliad and the Odyssey is original and revealing; it sheds light both on Homeric notions of justice and on the Archaic Greek society depicted in the poems. As Havelock continues his inquiry from Hesiod to Aeschylus, his findings become more complex. The oral Greek world shades into a literate one. Words lose some kinds of meanings, gain others, and steadily become more suited to the conceptualization that Plato strove for and achieved. This evolution of language itself, Havelock shows, was one of the principal accomplishments of the Greek world. Lucidly written and forcefully argued, this book is a major contribution to our knowledge of ancient Greece--its politics, philosophy, and literature, from Homer to Plato. (shrink)

The article discusses two areas at the intersection of social determinants of health research and social justice theory. The first section examines the affinity between social epidemiology and the capabilities approach. The second section examines how social epidemiology's expansion of the scope of the causal chain and determinants raises questions about epistemology and ontology in epidemiology as well as the field's link to the moral concern for human health.

This article introduces an intuitive conservation dilemma called the Canyon Dilemma: Is it possible to condemn the mining of the Grand Canyon, even by a poor generation, while also permitting this generation’s mining of an unremarkable small canyon? It then argues that not one of several prominent theories of environmental justice, including various forms of egalitarianism, welfarism, deep-ecological theories, communitarianism and free-market environmentalism, can navigate this dilemma. The article concludes by highlighting the dilemma-navigating potential of the equal-claims idea – (...) the idea that the natural world is something to which every human being, present and future, has an equal, substantive claim. (shrink)

How is distributive justice possible with respect to immigration if political decisions about entry and membership cannot be grounded in the symmetry of a prior commonality, human or otherwise, that could guarantee reciprocal relations between members and nonmembers? This paper deals with both aspects of this question. Initially, it engages critically with Seyla Benhabib's plea for ‘dialogical universalism,’ showing why the strong discontinuity between political and moral reciprocity precludes understanding distributive justice as the process of mediating between political (...) particularity and moral universality. Subsequently, it suggests that a way out of this conceptual and normative impasse can be found in the fact that boundaries create a double asymmetry. This double asymmetry is constitutive for the ‘dia’ of the political dialogue that separates and joins members and nonmembers. This ‘in between,’ which eludes control by the parties to a dialogue, is the realm of distributive justice. (shrink)

This book is about the postructural Franco-Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. This book covers Jewish ethics in the twentieth century and also cultural philosophy.

In a controlled laboratory experiment, we found evidence for our predictions that participants who received fair distributive treatment were more likely to lie to give a supervisor a good performance evaluation than those treated unfairly, and those who received unfair distributive treatment were more likely to steal money from a supervisor than those treated fairly. We further proposed that the presence of an ethical code of conduct would moderate these relationships such that when the code was present these relationships would (...) be weaker than when the code was absent, but we failed to find support for these moderating effects. Our findings suggest that the relationship between distributive justice and unethical behavior is likely more complex than previously considered. Both researchers and managers may benefit from a broader understanding of the factors that motivate and inhibit unethical behaviors intended to benefit and harm supervisors and/or organizations. (shrink)

We defend a scalar theory of the relationship between material scarcity and justice. As scarcity increases beyond a specified threshold, we argue that deontological egalitarian constraints should be gradually relaxed and consequentialist considerations should increasingly determine distributions. We construct this theory by taking a bottom-up approach that is guided by principles of medical triage. Armed with this theory, we consider the range of conditions under which justice applies. We argue that there are compelling reasons for thinking that (...) class='Hi'>justice applies under a far broader range of conditions than is standardly supposed, including those that could sensibly be labelled as conditions of extreme rather than moderate scarcity. (shrink)

The facts are dismal. One out of five inhabitants of the earth lives in absolute poverty, while one out of seven is afflicted by hunger. Extreme poverty exists alongside extreme abundance. Empirical evidence points not to scarcity but to poor politics as the primary cause. The urgency of the situation as well as the intertwined nature of human misery and politics would lead one to expect global justice to be a major component of any respectable study of world affairs. (...) Quite to the contrary, theories of world politics are generally silent on these issues. The poor and the oppressed remain invisible, even in accounts of our brand new 'global village'. ;This dissertation aims to rectify the normative deficit of international theory by analyzing closely John Rawls's latest book: The Law of Peoples . Rawls takes on the challenge raised by global inequality and develops a theory of global justice that places moral judgment and action at the heart of world politics. The substance of this theory is filled out by using the famous original position, with its veil of ignorance, this time to generate global principles that regulate relations among peoples. The result is reassuring: human misery requires a response wherever it is experienced. In nonideal theory, the Law of Peoples necessitates global engagement for the eradication of the great evils that have historically followed from political injustice. ;In stark contrast to this global activism, Rawls defends nonintervention and rejects redistribution in ideal theory. This has provoked a heated debate in political philosophy, leading to cosmopolitan criticism of the Rawlsian enterprise. In light of such cosmopolitan objections, I assess the contributions and limitations of the Rawlsian project for global justice. I argue that the fundamental ideas of Rawls's broader thought necessitate the endorsement of Rawls's procedure, while at the same time requiring the revision of the substantive principles of the Law of Peoples. Thus reaching cosmopolitan conclusions without cosmopolitan premises, I claim that my reformulated Law of Peoples is more Rawlsian in spirit than the versions offered by either Rawls himself or his cosmopolitan critics. (shrink)

Introduction: the grey goose -- The origins of civil society and the function of law -- Justice, ownership, and law -- Natural justice and conventional justice -- Justice and the trading order -- Adjudication and interpretation -- Morality, law, and legislation -- Natural law -- Rights -- The force of law -- The authority and legitimacy of law -- Conclusion.

Emmanuel Levinas can be read as challenging the legal principle that everybody must be treated in the same way without fear of favor, no matter who they are or what status they hold. He did so by highlighting the private suffering that goes unnoticed if justice is blind, as is suggested by the image of Iustitia wearing a blindfold. What this unspeakable suffering means for justice is explored through a reading of Jean Améry’s At the Mind's Limit and (...) Jill Stauffer’s Ethical Loneliness: The Injustice of Not Being Heard. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that de Shalit’s claim that there is a tension between a commitment to democracy and methodological approaches in political philosophy that do not take the views of members of the public as inputs to theorizing is mistaken. I also argue that adopting the method of ‘public reflective equilibrium’ that de Shalit recommends would undercut important roles that political philosophy should play in both our thinking about and our pursuit of justice.

In this paper I argue that when thinking about justice, political philosophers should pay more attention to social norms, not just the usual subjects of basic principles, rights, laws, and policies. I identify two widely-endorsed ideas about political philosophy that interfere with recognizing the importance of social norms—ideas I dub ‘compulsoriness’ and ‘institutionalism’—and argue for their rejection. I do this largely by focusing on questions about who can and should be an agent of justice. I argue that (...) careful reflection on these questions supports a kind of pluralism that reveals the importance of social norms, three types of which I discuss. (shrink)

The law of contracts, at least in its orthodox expression, concerns voluntary, or chosen, legal obligations. When Brody accepts Susan’s offer to sell him a canoe for a set price, the parties’ choices alter their legal rights and duties. Their success at changing the legal landscape depends on a background system of rules that specify when and how contractual acts have legal effects, rules that give the offer and acceptance of a bargain-exchange a central role in generating obligations. Contract law (...) conceived as a body of rules empowering individuals to shape their own rights and responsibilities presents an object of philosophical study. The philosophy of contract includes two broad sets of projects. One set, the focus of the first part of this entry, targets the basic structure and normative justification of the law of contracts. The aim is to subsume a salient body of contract law rules under general principles in order to clarify contract law’s conceptual categories, distinguish it from other areas of law, and specify criteria relevant to its normative appraisal. This kind of philosophical work presupposes detailed knowledge of the law in existing legal regimes, and the entry begins by outlining the common law of contracts. A second set of projects draws on resources from the philosophy of language, philosophy of action, and moral and political philosophy to address debates within contract law. Questions about the nature of meaning and interpretation, intentionality, freedom in contract, and distributive justice drive contemporary legal debates concerning contract formation, interpretation, and enforcement. Philosophical work on these topics has attracted significant commentary which serves as the focus of the second part of this entry. (shrink)

Fifty years after the famous essay “The Problem of Social Cost” (1960) by the Nobel laureate Ronald Coase, Law and Economics seems to have become the lingua franca of American jurisprudence, and although its influence on European jurisprudence is only moderate by comparison, it has also gained popularity in Europe. A highly influential publication of a different nature was the Brundtland Report (1987), which extended the concept of sustainability from forestry to the whole of the economy and society. According to (...) this report, development is sustainable when it “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”. A key requirement of sustainable development is justice to future generations. It is still a matter of fact that the law as well as the theories of justice are generally restricted to the resolution of conflicts between contemporaries and between people living in the same country. This in turn raises a number of questions: what is the philosophical justification for intergenerational justice? What bearing does sustainability have on the efficiency principle? How do we put a policy of sustainability into practice, and what is the role of the law in doing so? The present volume is devoted to these questions. In Part One, “Law and Economics”, the role of economic analysis and efficiency in law is examined more closely. Part Two, “Law and Sustainability”, engages with the themes of sustainable development and justice to future generations. Finally, Part Three, “Law, Economics and Sustainability”, addresses the interrelationships between the different aspects. (shrink)

This highly original book sheds new light on aspects of incommensurability of values and its implications for ethics and justice. It provides original and innovative analysis of the characteristics of incommensurability in relation to values, and explores the implications of incommensurability for ethics, justice and public decision-making.

In the discussion of global ethics, philosophical ethics risks losing its distinct theoretical horizons. This predicament arises primarily from philosophy's failure to anchor its own object and to provide a rational basis for global justice from within its current confined theoretical paradigm. Against this background, this paper will first prioritize global co-existence as the primary concern of global ethics, then propose ontological co-existence justice as its foundational principle, and finally argue that the normative validity of co-existence (...) class='Hi'>justice is predicated on the nations fulfilling the critical requirements of modern civilization, namely, the advancement of individual freedom. (shrink)

Global Social Justice provides a distinctive contribution to the growing debate about global justice and global ethics. It brings a multi-disciplinary voice âe" which spans philosophical, political and social disciplines âe" and emphasises the social element of global justice in both theory and practice. Bringing together a number of internationally renowned scholars, the book explicitly addresses debates about the scope and hierarchies of justice and considers how different approaches and conceptions of justice inter relate. It (...) explores a diversity of themes relating to global social justice including globalisation, human rights, ecological justice, gender and sexuality, migration and trafficking, global health challenges, post-conflict resolution and torture. Global Social Justice will be vital reading for anyone interested in the political/philosophical theories and practical issues surrounding global social justice, including students and scholars of Political Science, International Relations, Philosophy, Global Ethics, Environmental Studies, Development Studies, Human Rights Law and Global Studies. (shrink)