Expanding the Horizons of Social Justice Research: Three Essays on Justice Theory

2015

Most of the time people look to the law for justice. The demand for justice is made in the form of a legal or moral claim. A person accused of a crime claims the right to fair trial or procedural justice. People’s demand for punishment of a criminal act is a demand for justice. A citizen’s claim to equality before the law is a claim of justice. Justice is not exclusively a jurist’s concern. It is at the center of moral and social philosophy. Justice has been termed as the highest virtue. It has also been equated with fairness. The concept of just entitlement is also central to the theme of justice. A person who is fair, generous and helpful engages in the virtue of beneficence. Sympathy is the origin of the ideas of beneficence and of justice. The most recent idea of justice puts emphasis on the role of public reason in establishing what can make societies less unjust. The aim of this paper is to evaluate various paradigms of the concept of justice and to highlight how the ideal of ...

On the Conceptual Status of Justice (doctoral dissertation)

Queen's University, 2015

In contemporary debates about justice, political philosophers take themselves to be engaged with a subject that’s narrower than the whole of morality. Many contemporary liberals, notably John Rawls, understand this narrowness in terms of context specificity. On their view, justice is the part of morality that applies to the context of a society’s institutions, but only has indirect application to the context of citizens’ personal lives (unlike the rest of morality). In contrast, many value pluralists, notably G.A. Cohen, understand justice’s narrowness in terms of singularity against a plural background. On their view, justice is one fundamental value amongst a plurality of fundamental values. The purpose of my thesis is to establish that the pluralist conception of justice’s narrowness is (a) theoretically significant and (b) true. To establish its theoretical significance, I argue that proper attention to the ways in which different understandings of narrowness inform the work of contemporary egalitarians explains a considerable amount of disagreement between them concerning the content and scope of distributive justice. On the one hand, I’ll argue that if we understand justice’s narrowness in the manner Cohen and other pluralists do, i.e., understand a conception of justice to be a conception of a particular fundamental value, then both luck-egalitarianism and the claim that justice extends to the personal context are compelling. On the other hand, I’ll argue that if we understand justice’s narrowness in a contextual manner, i.e., understand justice to comprise one or more all-things-considered principles adopted for the institutional context, then both luck-egalitarianism and the claim that justice extends to the personal context prove implausible. To establish the truth of the pluralist conception of narrowness, I argue first, that the contextual understanding is only plausible if fairness should be understood procedurally instead of substantively; and second, that substantive fairness cannot be eliminated, as specifying the content of procedural fairness requires a substantive criterion. The upshot is that justice’s narrowness is best understood in terms of singularity against a plural background, rather than in terms of context specificity.

Why is Justice Regarded as so Important? Theoretical Considerations and an Empirical Test of a Fundamental Question

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000

Whether fat or thin, male or female, young or old-people are different. Alongside their physical features, they also differ in terms of nationality and ethnicity; in their cultural preferences, lifestyles, attitudes, orientations, and philosophies; in their competencies, qualifications, and traits; and in their professions. But how do such heterogeneities lead to social inequalities? What are the social mechanisms that underlie this process? These are the questions pursued by the DFG Research Center (Sonderforschungsbereich (SFB)) "From Heterogeneities to Inequalities" at Bielefeld University, which was approved by the German Research Foundation (DFG) as "SFB 882" on May 25, 2011. In the social sciences, research on inequality is dispersed across different research fields such as education, the labor market, equality, migration, health, or gender. One goal of the SFB is to integrate these fields, searching for common mechanisms in the emergence of inequality that can be compiled into a typology. More than fifty senior and junior researchers and the Bielefeld University Library are involved in the SFB. Along with sociologists, it brings together scholars from the Bielefeld University faculties of Business Administration and Economics, Educational Science, Health Science, and Law, as well as from the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW) in Berlin and the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. In addition to carrying out research, the SFB is concerned to nurture new academic talent, and therefore provides doctoral training in its own integrated Research Training Group. A data infrastructure project has also been launched to archive, prepare, and disseminate the data gathered. Research Project A6 "The Legitimation of Inequalities-Structural Conditions of Justice Attitudes over the Life-span" This project investigates (a) the conditions under which inequalities are perceived as problems of justice and (b) how embedment in different social contexts influences the formation of attitudes to justice across the life course. We assume that individuals evaluate inequalities in terms of whether they consider them just, and that they hold particular attitudes toward justice because, and as long as, these help them to attain their fundamental goals and to solve, especially, the problems that arise through cooperation with other people (cooperative relations). As a result, attitudes on justice are not viewed either as rigidly stable orientations across the life span or as "Sunday best beliefs" i.e. short-lived opinions that are adjusted continuously to fit situational interests. Instead, they are regarded as being shaped by the opportunities for learning and making comparisons in different phases of the life course and different social contexts. The goal of the project is to use longitudinal survey data to explain why individuals have particular notions of justice. The key aspect is taken to be changes in the social contextparticularly households, social networks, or workplaces-in which individuals are embedded across their life course. This is because social contexts offer opportunities to make social comparisons and engage in social learning, processes that are decisive in the formation of particular attitudes to justice. The project will test this empirically by setting up a special longitudinal panel in which the same individuals will be interviewed three times over an 11year period. The results of the project will permit conclusions to be drawn on the consequences of changes in a society's social and economic structure for its members' ideas about justice. The project therefore supplements the analysis of the mechanisms that produce inequality, which is the focus of SFB 882 as a whole, by looking at subjective evaluations, and it complements that focus by addressing the mechanisms of attitude formation. Research goals (1) Analysis of the conditions in which justice is used as a criterion for evaluating inequalities. (2) Explanation of attitudes toward justice as the outcome of comparison and learning processes mediated by the social context. (3) Longitudinal observation of the individual development of attitudes to justice over the life course. Research design (1) Continuation and expansion of the longitudinal survey of evaluations of justice conducted by the German SocioEconomic Panel Study (SOEP). (2) Commencement of an independent longitudinal panel with ties to the process-generated individual data of the German Institute for Employment Research (IAB) and information on companies and households (the plan is to carry out three survey waves over an 11-year period).

The Many Faces of Justice and Its Structural Foundations

By reviewing some key sociologists that deal with this distinction (Simmel, Durkheim, Parsons, Luhmann), I intend to identify the paradoxical and multilayered character of the inclusion/exclusion-situations (1). Having this framework in mind, I shall reconstruct the foundations of three contemporary approaches to justice (F. Hayek, J. Rawls and G. Teubner) in order to relate them with the inclusion/exclusion-paradoxes and assess their normative orientation and how unilateral their conception of justice may be. Methodologically, the selection of these three authors illustrates the focus of the theories of justice on three sociologically distinguishable operational levels: the interaction, the national-institutional and the supranational level. In this vein, I begin with the liberal conception of Friedrich Hayek, whose concept of justice focuses on the individual abilities to deal with exclusions and overlooks the institutional aspects of justice as well as the conditions of sub-inclu...

Shifting the Focus From Pursuing Justice to Preventing Manifest Injustices

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