Justice

There are various ways of reducing conflicts and of stabilizing the political situation in states where society is made up of many different ethnic groups and religious communities, and where relations between these segments – or between them and the central government – are tense. A particularly important way is the establishment in those states of a political system based on power-sharing (PS), which allows members of various ethnic and religious segments to take part in the exercise of power. The (...) literature on the subject usually discusses two models of PS: consociationalism and centripetalism. A third model is encountered in practice, however, that of hybrid power-sharing (HPS), which combines the institutions of the first two. The main objective of this article is to explain the nature and origins of HPS. (shrink)

This article starts off with a historical section showing that deep disagreements among notions of social and political justice are a characteristic feature of the history of political thought. Since no agreement or consensus on distributive justice is possible, the article argues that political philosophers should – instead of continuously proposing new normative theories of justice – focus on analyzing the reasons, significance, and consequences of such kinds of disagreements. The next two sections are analytical. The first sketches five possible (...) reasons for deep disagreements among notions of social and political justice. The second discusses the meta-ethical relevance of the lack of consensus on justice and rejects ethical realism and cognitivism based on the argument from deep disagreements. (shrink)

El artículo se concentra en indagar las diferentes declaraciones de Marx sobre la justicia, con la intención de determinar tres cuestiones: en primer lugar, saber si nuestro autor cuenta con una concepción de la justicia; en segundo lugar, establecer si la reflexión acerca de lo que es justo ocupa un lugar privilegiado en su obra; y, en tercer lugar, ver si a partir de ahí puede colegirse la existencia de una teoría marxiana de la justicia. De especial interés resulta la (...) presencia de argumentos con implicaciones éticas y morales en estos asuntos. (shrink)

I argue that given the persistent injustice present within the Prison Industrial Complex in the United States, many incarcerated individuals would be justified in attempting to escape and that these prison breaks may qualify as acts of civil disobedience. After an introduction in section one, section two offers a critique of the classical liberal conception of civil disobedience envisioned by John Rawls. Contrary to Rawls, I argue that acts of civil disobedience can involve both violence and evasion of punishment, both (...) of which are necessary components of prison breaks. In section three I outline the broad circumstances in which escape attempts would be justified, which are when individuals have either been incarcerated on unjust grounds (such as coercive plea bargains, draconian laws, or institutionalized discrimination) or when individuals are subject to inhumane conditions within prison (such as physical or sexual abuse, inadequate medical care, and overcrowding). Although this framework is formulated with the U.S. criminal justice system in mind, it is potentially applicable to other instances of incarceration if they’re similarly unjust such as prisons in other countries, migrant detention centers, or psychiatric wards. I then outline four requirements which must be met for these prison breaks to qualify as civil disobedience. First, escape must be attempted as a last resort. Second, violence and other law-breaking must be reasonable, meaning it is done with precision, discretion, and proportion. Third, escapees hold the burden of proving they have been subject to injustice. Fourth and finally, the act of escape must contain other key components of civil disobedience such as persuasion, communication, and publicity, which will most likely be accomplished via coordination with non-incarcerated individuals. In section four I address the distinction between prison reform and abolition. (shrink)

This chapter outlines a new theoretical method, which I call “dancing-with,” emerging from the process of writing my dissertation and the book manuscript that followed it. Defined formally, a given theorist X can be said to “dance-with” with a second theorist Y insofar as X “choreographs” an interpretation of Y which is both true to Y and Y’s historical communities, and also meaningful and actionable (i.e. facilitating social justice) for X and X’s historical communities. In this pursuit, the method of (...) dancing-with involves both (1) a creative “torsion” of Y’s thought (particularly in the direction of unconscious, embodied and political factors at work in Y’ texts), and (2) a resultant, sympathetic torsion of X’s thought toward Y. In other words, X and Y “meet in the middle,” like two dancers walking onto the dance floor, to explore the promise of a flourishing artistic partnership. In this partnership, each must attend to the way that political meanings are inscribed on the other’s raced/sexed/etc. body, both to react maximally justly, and to maximize the aesthetic movement options that can be brought into play. As the method of dancing-with is thus modeled on an ideal comportment for improvisational social dance (such as the contemporary Latin dance called “salsa”), I envision the end-goal of dancing-with as what I call “poetic social justice.” By this, I mean the “poetic justice” of two theorists’ mutually empowering each other for maximal social good. Though this process is admittedly more difficult between some theorists, in part as a function of their respective embodiments and sociohistorical positions, at least a move or two together is always possible. (shrink)

On Jaeggi’s reading, the immanent and progressive features of ideology critique are rooted in the connection between its explanatory and its normative tasks. I argue that this claim can be cashed out in terms of the mechanisms involved in a functional explanation of ideology and that stability plays a crucial role in this connection. On this reading, beliefs can be said to be ideological if (a) they have the function of supporting existing social practices, (b) they are the output of (...) systematically distorted processes of belief formation, (c) the conditions in which distorting mechanisms trigger can be traced back to structural causal factors shaped by the social practice their outputs are designed to support. Functional problems thus turn out to be interlocked with normative problems because ideology fails to provide principles to regulate cooperation that would be accepted under conditions of non-domination, hence failing to anchor a stable cooperative scheme. By explaining ideology as parasitic on domination, ideology critique points to the conditions under which cooperation stabilizes as those of a practice whose principles are accepted without coercion. Thus, it seems to entail a conception of justice whose principles are articulated as part of a theory of social cooperation. (shrink)

Prepared for an online reference volume meant to enable dialogue on shared terms among people in the various fields related to ethics and artificial intelligence (e.g., computer science, political theory, philosophy, law), this piece has two aims. One is to explain to non-specialists what political theorists and philosophers are talking about when we talk about “justice.” The other is to discuss some particular questions of justice implicated by the use of artificial intelligence. The piece also includes a thematically-organized reading list (...) designed for those who aren’t specialists in political theory or philosophy, but who are interested in learning more about justice as it’s conceptualized in these disciplines. (shrink)

[First paragraphs: This essay takes its practical orientation from my experiences as a member of a philosophy reading group on death row at Riverbend Maximum Security Penitentiary in Nashville, Tennessee. Its theoretical orientation comes from W. E. B. Du Bois’ lecture-turned-essay, “Criteria of Negro Art,” which argues that the realm of aesthetics is vitally important in the war against racial discrimination in the United States. And since, according to Michele Alexander’s critically-acclaimed The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age (...) of Colorblindness, the prison system should be the primary front today in this war, my essay’s ultimate aim is t/o articulate a new criterion of the present-day “Negro” art being created by a prison population that is still overwhelmingly constituted by persons of color. In my first section, I will show how Du Bois’ insights in “Criteria of Negro Art” remain relevant today, especially in the prison context, and argue that it is thus appropriate for my new criterion to be shaped by his distinctive conception of “propaganda.” In my second section, through a close reading of two texts by Michel Foucault (the pivotal thinker of modern imprisonment), I will flesh out this new criterion, “self-torsion,” defined as the effect of prisoners’ attempts at self-care within a prison system that distorts those attempts into further exploitation of both prisoners and the outside world that imprisons them. And my final section, in an attempt to illustrate this new criterion’s efficacy as a form of propagandistic resistance to contemporary racism, will deploy self-torsion as a critique of two artworks created by imprisoned members of my reading group at Riverbend penitentiary. (shrink)

[First paragraph]: On Wednesday, June 8, 2011, UK’s The Guardian reported that numerous US universities including Harvard and Vanderbilt were invested in companies that were buying large tracts of African farmland and kicking off the indigenous farmers in order for their employees (mostly non-Africans) to grow cash crops to sell to Europe.1 Harms associated with this land-grabbing include, in addition to the evictions themselves, corruption among African governments and among absentee African land owners, increased food prices, and accelerated climate change.

Dance receives relatively little attention in the history of philosophy. My strategy for connecting that history to dance consists in tracing a genealogy of its dance-relevant moments. In preparation, I perform a phenomenological analysis of my own eighteen years of dance experience, in order to generate a small cluster of central concepts or “Moves” for elucidating dance. At this genealogical-phenomenological intersection, I find what I term “positure” most helpfully treated in Plato, Aristotle and Nietzsche; “gesture” similarly in Condillac, Mead and (...) Kristeva; “grace” in Avicenna, Schiller and Dewey; and “resilience” in Fanon, (Judith) Butler and Deleuze. With these analyses in place, I apply the four Moves in analyzing various forms of dancing (including salsa dancing and the pollen dance of the honeybee) and coordinate them to outline a comprehensive philosophy of dance. This philosophy points to certain conditions for an ideally flourishing, dancing society. And these conditions create the possibility for a coalition of sympathetic discourses (including critical race theory, queer theory, disability studies and democratic theory) united in pursuit of political virtue. The development of a philosophy of dance offers a deeper understanding of the intellectual values of a practice often identified with bodily immediacy and therefore judged uninteresting. It also reinvigorates philosophy with the dynamism and bodily relevance of the practice of dancing. Most important, it demonstrates the meaningful intersection of aesthetics and political ethics, by exploring how aesthetic practices underlie and inspire human flourishing. (shrink)

In this chapter, I approach the subject of peace by way of Andrew Fiala’s pioneering, synthetic work on “practical pacifism.” One of Fiala’s articles on the subject of peace is entitled “Radical Forgiveness and Human Justice”—and if one were to replace “Radical Forgiveness” with “Peace,” this would be a fair title for my chapter. In fact, Fiala himself explicitly makes a connection in the article between radical forgiveness and peace. Also in support of my project, Fiala’s article names four of (...) the six historical figures who are central to my chapter, namely Marcus Aurelius, King, Arendt, and Nietzsche. Moreover, Fiala also insists there “forgiveness must be held in creative tension with justice,” and it is this very tension that forms the basis of my new conception of socially-just peace. To wit, I propose that socially-just peace is lovingly generous reimagining (peace) through intuitively self-overcoming tension (social justice). (shrink)

This article explores Fanon's thought on dance, beginning with his explicit treatment of it in Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth. It then broadens to consider his theorization of Black embodiment in racist and colonized societies, considering how these analyses can be reformulated as a phenomenology of dance. This will suggest possibilities for fruitful encounters between the two domains in which (a) dance can be valorized while (b) opening up sites of resignification and resistance for Black (...) persons and communities-including a revalorization of Black embodiment as a kind of empowering danced experience. (shrink)

For years now, unionization has been under vigorous attack. Membership has been steadily declining, and with it union bargaining power. As a result, unions may soon lose their ability to protect workers from economic and personal abuse, as well as their significance as a political force. In the Name of Liberty responds to this worrying state of affairs by presenting a new argument for unionization, one that derives an argument for universal unionization in both the private and public sector from (...) concepts of liberty that we already accept. In short, In the Name of Liberty reclaims the argument for liberty from the political right, and shows how liberty not only requires the unionization of every workplace as a matter of background justice, but also supports a wide variety of other progressive policies. (shrink)

This paper explores the idea of robust discursive equality on which respect-based conceptions of justificatory reciprocity often draw. I distinguish between formal and substantive discursive equality and argue that if justificatory reciprocity requires that people be accorded formally equal discursive standing, robust discursive equality should not be construed as requiring standing that is equal substantively, or in terms of its discursive purchase. Still, robust discursive equality is purchase sensitive: it does not obtain when discursive standing is impermissibly unequal in purchase. (...) I then showcase different candidate conceptions of purchase justice, and draw conclusions about the substantive commitments of justificatory reciprocity. (shrink)

In this paper, I show how a novel treatment of speech acts can be combined with a well-known liberal argument for multiculturalism in a way that will justify claims about the preservation, protection, or accommodation of minority languages. The key to the paper is the claim that every language makes a distinctive range of speech acts possible, acts that cannot be realized by means of any other language. As a result, when a language disappears, so does a class of speech (...) acts. If we accept that our social identities are in large part constituted by the decisions we make about how to speak, language loss, then, will amount to a substantial infringement on our autonomy in a particularly important domain. (shrink)

في معية الإخفاقات الحضارية المتتالية للعقل العربي في عالمنا المعاصر؛ حيث تم تجريد الأشياء – والقضايا والسياسات والمواقف والقرارات والعلاقات – من معانيها، أو بالأحرى تم مسخها بمعانٍ زائفة تُلبي حاجات الزيف الممسك بتلابيب الواقع، واتسعت الفجوة بين كلٍ العقل ومنطقه، والتفكير ومبادئه، والعلم ومنهجه، والدين ورسالته، والإنسان وإنسانيته، وبين ماضي العربي وحاضره، ثم بين حاضره ومستقبله ... يغدو البحث عن معنى – باستقامة معنى «المعنى» وعقلانيته – محاولة أخيرة لإدراك الغاية من الوجود، وإنعاش قلب أوشك نبضه على التوقف، واستعادة (...) حياة أوشكت أسبابها على النفاد. ولا غرو، فالبحث عن المعنى غريزة إنسانية، وكُلنا في الوطن العربي هذا الكائن المسكين المُتحير، الباحث عن معنى الوجود والهوية، معنى الحياة ومعنى الموت؛ معنى الحرية ومعنى الكرامة؛ معنى السعادة ومعنى الحُزن؛ معنى الدين ومعنى الوطن؛ ... إلخ. هذا هو هدف الكتاب وفقًا عنوانه، لكن هدفه الأعمق هو إيقاظ العقل العربي المعاصر من سباته الدوجماطيقي الذي أقعده عن اللحاق بركب التقدم المعرفي، وأحاطه بأسيجة الموجب والقاطع والثابت في عالم تتسارع فيه وتائر التغير, وتنهار فيه الحواجز الفاصلة بين كثرة من الثنائيات المستقرة في أذهاننا، ومن ثم يأتي الكتاب كمحاولة، لا لطرح إجابات قاطعة يأباها المنطق، أو تدشين رؤية أحادية البُعد قد يراها البعض تشاؤمية، وإنما لترميم الداخل المهجور، والخارج المنظور، من خلال قراءة متأنية للأفكار والأحداث تسعى إلى الكشف عن أطياف التناقض المعتملة بدواخلها، والمستترة خلف مظاهر التسويق للوهم! (shrink)

This paper challenges one of the main contributions of Political Liberalism (PL), namely the burdens of judgment (BoJ), on the grounds that it is superfluous to the project of excluding matters of the good from politics and it makes PL susceptible to a scepticism objection. From Rawls’s PL, we can extract two arguments for epistemic restraint in the public realm. The first is a moral argument based on the principles of fairness and reciprocity. The second is an epistemic argument derived (...) from the idea of the insurmountability of BoJ. The second of these arguments, I contend, is superfluous for two reasons: (i) BoJ, as a descriptive claim cannot itself explain why citizens should uphold a form of toleration that requires them to honor their epistemic restraint in politics. (ii) The moral argument alone is sufficient to justify epistemic constraint in the public realm through the reasonable exercise of political power. -/- Moreover, acceptance of the BoJ is incompatible with subscribing to a reasonable comprehensive doctrine (RCD) with a degree of certainty that is required to be convinced of any such doctrine. The relation between BoJ and scepticism has been addressed before but these thinkers assume that it is the implication of BoJ namely, reasonable disagreement that entails scepticism. This paper lays new sceptical challenges at the doorstep of PL and these new challenges focus on the very idea of the insurmountability of BoJ. Furthermore, it argues that scepticism is not an appropriate epistemic commitment for PL as it is incompatible with the aim of freestanding political conception of justice. Also, it is subversive of the purpose of an overlapping consensus because the idea underpinning an overlapping consensus is that citizens should not only appreciate liberal political principles as reasonable but they should also accept them as true on the basis of their own religious or philosophical reasons. Provided that BoJ entails scepticism, BoJ makes citizens’ religious and philosophical truth claims utterly irrelevant to the stability of society. Accordingly, I argue that the Rawlsian account of reasonableness must relinquish the epistemic component, BoJ; instead it should articulate how the moral component of reasonableness entails the principles of epistemic restraint in politics and acting from public reasons. (shrink)

The paper examines Martha Nussbaum’s «Aristotelian Social Democracy», and in particular her appropriation of Aristotle’s political philosophy. The paper questions Nussbaum’s claim that Aristotle’s account of human nature and her capabilities approach are not metaphysical. It critically analyses Nussbaum’s egalitarian interpretation of Aristotle’s doctrine of distributive justice, laying out the primary reasons supporting the thesis that Nussbaum’s «Aristotelian Social Democracy» is incompatible with Aristotle’s non-egalitarian political philosophy.

This short article lays the foundation for a theory of migratorial disobedience and explains how pro-border advocates fetishize immigration law.

In this article I analyse two complaints of white vilification, which are increasingly occurring in Australia. I argue that, though the complainants (and white people generally) are not harmed by such racialized speech, the complainants in fact harm Australians of colour through these utterances. These complaints can both cause and constitute at least two forms of epistemic injustice (willful hermeneutical ignorance and comparative credibility excess). Further, I argue that the complaints are grounded in a dual misrecognition: the complainants misrecognize themselves (...) in their own privileged racial specificity, and they misrecognize others in their own marginal racial specificity. Such misrecognition preserves the cultural imperialism of Australia’s dominant social imaginary—a means of oppression that perpetuates epistemic insensitivity.Bringing this dual misrecognition to light best captures the indignity that is suffered by the victims of the aforementioned epistemic injustices. I argue that it is only when we truly recognize difference in its own terms, shifting the dominant social imaginary, that “mainstream Australians”can do their part in bringing about a just society. (shrink)

Interview with Kai Nielsen conducted by David Rondel and Alex Sager.

Since G.A. Cohen’s influential criticism, John Rawls’s focus on the basic structure of society has fallen out of favor in moral and political philosophy. The most prominent defenses of this focus has argued from particular conceptions of justice or from a moral division of labor. In this dissertation, I instead argue for the Rawlsian focus from the ways in which social institutions establish new obligations, rights and powers. I argue that full evaluation of individual conduct requires that we evaluate the (...) practices within which an individual’s actions occur. Likewise, full evaluation of practices often requires evaluating the systems within which actions occur. I argue that we should treat the basic structure of society as a moral subject because the full evaluation of the various institutions that constitute the basic structure requires that we evaluate the basic structure as a whole. This argument shows the advantages of the Rawlsian approach even when we do not accept contractualism, constructivism or the two principles of justice. We need only accept the view that the major social institutions establish obligations, rights, and powers for individuals as members of society. (shrink)

In the first section of this essay, I offer a brief overview of Hegel’s dozen or so mentions of dance in his Lectures on Aesthetics, focusing on the tension between Hegel’s denigration of dance as an “imperfect art” and his characterization of dance as a potential threat to the other arts. In the second section, I turn to an insightful essay from Hans-Christian Lucas on Hegel’s “Anthropology,” focusing on his argument that the Anthropology’s crucial final sections threaten to undermine Hegel’s (...) entire philosophy. And in the final section, I offer my own reading of the Anthropology, connecting the threads of my previous two sections. More specifically, I attempt to show that Hegel has in effect quarantined dance in what he terms “the dark regions” of madness in “The Feeling Soul.” Overall, I suggest that this quarantining is ultimately as problematic for Hegel as it has been for dance. Because without dance, complete with its associations with people disempowered in their embodiment, this crucial transitional section in the Anthropology remains burdened with a corporeal remainder that problematizes the entire system. Put simply, Hegel must – by his own logic – learn to dance gracefully with those he would rather shun. (shrink)

The question of how democracy can deal with cultural diversity has become more central than ever. The increasing flow of people to many Western democratic countries indicates that our societies will become more and more multicultural. But what is the best way for democracy to deal with cultural diversity? It has been argued that, given its communicative core, the Habermasian model of deliberative democracy provides a platform where cultural groups can concur on peaceful agreements. In this paper, I show the (...) limits of this model of democracy in relation to diverse cultural traditions to public interactions. I will discuss the case of societies and ethnic groups of a Confucian heritage and show that Habermas’ account of public deliberation is not a neutral method for facilitating political decision making, but is culturally biased. (shrink)

Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations constitutes an important source and subject for Michel Foucault’s 1981 lectures at the Collège de France, translated into English as Hermeneutics of the Subject. One recurring theme in these lectures is the deployment by Hellenistic/Roman philosophers such as Aurelius of the practice and figure of dance. Inspired by this discussion, the present essay offers a close reading of dance in the Meditations, followed by a survey of the secondary literature on this subject. Overall, I will attempt to (...) show that, despite Aurelius’s self-consciously critical comportment toward dance, dance nevertheless performs a critical function in the construction of what I will term his “political ethics.” This political ethics, I will argue, is composed of an ethics of patient tolerance funded by the generosity that flows from the micro-political power generated by cultivating the god that Aurelius identifies within each of us. (shrink)

An inverse akratic act is one who believes X, all things considered, is the correct act, and yet performs ~X, where ~X is the correct act. A famous example of such a person is Huck Finn. He believes that he is wrong in helping Jim, and yet continues to do so. In this paper I investigate Huck’s nature to see why he performs such acts contrary to his beliefs. In doing so, I explore the nature of empathy and show how (...) powerful Huck’s empathic feelings are. Drawing from Martin L. Hoffman, I show the relationship between empathy and a principle of justice. This relationship leads to Huck acting virtuously, as Rosalind Hursthouse maintains. (shrink)

Advocates of remedying historical injustices urge political communities to take responsibility for their past, but their arguments are ambiguous about whether all past injustices need remedy, or just those regarding groups that suffer from current injustice. This ambiguity leaves unanswered the challenge of critics who argue that contemporary injustices matter, not those in the past. I argue instead for a focus on injustices that have roots in the past, and continue to the present day, what I call enduring injustice. Instead (...) of focusing on finding the party responsible for the injustice, I argue that we use history to help us understand why some injustices endure, which I suggest is partly due to the limitations of liberal justice. I conclude with a conception of responsibility for repairing enduring injustice that deemphasizes searching for the causal agent, and instead focuses on how to repair the injustice, which I explain through an expansive conception of shared space. (shrink)

A short paper discussing the question of whether adults' interest in parenting can play a role in justifying the right to rear children.

Child poverty is one of the biggest challenges of today, harming millions of children. In this book, it is investigated from a philosophical social justice perspective, primarily in the context of modern welfare states. Based on both normative theory (particularly the capability approach) and empirical evidence, the authors identify the injustices of child poverty, showing how it negatively affects the well-being of children as well as their whole life course. But child poverty is not 'given by nature'. It is avoidable (...) and there is certainly the moral duty to alleviate it. Therefore, Graf and Schweiger develop a normative theory of responsibilities, which clarifies the moral role of different agents in the poor child's environment: the family, the state and many others, that have so far been neglected in philosophical theories. They conclude their book by sketching how their theory can be extended to global child poverty and what it means to show equal respect and concern for every child - no matter where and in which context they were born. (shrink)

Amartya Sen has made a major contribution to the theory of social justice, and of gender justice, by arguing that capabilities are the relevant space of comparison when justice-related issues are considered. This article supports Sen's idea, arguing that capabilities supply guidance superior to that of utility and resources (the view's familiar opponents), but also to that of the social contract tradition, and at least some accounts of human rights. But I argue that capabilities can help us to construct a (...) normative conception of social justice, with critical potential for gender issues, only if we specify a definite set of capabilities as the most important ones to protect. Sen's "perspective of freedom" is too vague. Some freedoms limit others; some freedoms are important, some trivial, some good, and some positively bad. Before the approach can offer a valuable normative gender perspective, we must make commitments about substance. (shrink)

Imagine yourself standing on the edge of a canyon, marveling at the terrain below, wondering about all the sights currently obscured from your view, and lamenting that you just don’t have time to commit to the steep descent in and long trek across, which would give you a perspective from right up close. Being handed Juha Räikkä’s new book Social Justice in Practice is like being told there’s a flying fox you can take: the canyon is applied political theory, and (...) the flying fox allows the reader to see many different issues, at some speed, and always with the wider context in view. Tuck your loose items of clothing away in your bags, and hop on.The book is loosely organized into six sections, with twelve chapters overall. The first two sections (“Theory and Practice” and “Action and Uncertainty”) introduce readers to the issues around the methodology of contemporary political theory, from whether the arguments of political theory should be more sensitive to what is feasible, through the. (shrink)

Thus far, the recognition approach as described in the works of Axel Honneth has not systematically engaged with the problem of poverty. To fill this gap, the present contribution will focus on poverty conceived as social exclusion in the context of the European Union and probe its moral significance. It will show that this form of social exclusion is morally harmful and wrong from the perspective of the recognition approach. To justify this finding, social exclusion has to fulfil three conditions: (...) (i) it has to be experienced as harmful by the socially excluded, (ii) it has to meet certain objective criteria, and (iii) it has to violate normative claims embedded within society. (shrink)

The public interest in the administration of justice requires access to justice for all. But access to justice must be “meaningful” access. Meaningful access requires procedures, processes, and institutional structures that facilitate communication among participants and decision-makers and ensure that judges and other decision-makers have the resources they need to render fully informed and sound decisions. Working from that premise, which is based on a reconceptualization of the objectives and methods of the justice process, the author proposes numerous specific changes (...) in decision-making processes and practices. These changes are required to achieve a standard of decision-making that is consistent with the public interest in the administration of justice within a constitutional framework under the social and political conditions of the early 21st century. The essay illustrates the application of the principles and methods of legitecture to analysis of problems of institutional design in law. (shrink)

This paper contends that Ananda Abeysekara’s notion of un-inheritance, developed via a Derridean analysis of contemporary Sri Lankan politics and society, can act as a helpful supplement to the concept of justice. What one finds in Abeysekara’s analysis is an interpretation of justice as ultimately aporetic: justice both opens up to the possibility of its ever greater concrete realization and continually defers its completion. This paper begins by examining the aporetic character of justice as articulated by Derrida. It then proceeds (...) to Abeysekara’s account, situated as it is within a largely political consideration of Sri Lanka’s multicultural heritage and the recent conflicts that have arisen there. Abeysekara offers the notion of un-heritance as a way of thinking the possibility of justice precisely when political—and also religious—traditions come to an impasse, thus recognizing the inescapably aporetic structure of justice itself. (shrink)

Few have discussed Rawls's arguments for the value of democracy. This is because his arguments, as arguments that the principle of equal basic liberty should include democratic liberties, are incomplete. Rawls says little about the inclusion of political liberties of a democratic sort – such as the right to vote – among the basic liberties. And, at times, what he does say is unconvincing. My aim is to complete and, where they fail, to reconceive Rawls's arguments and to show that (...) a principle requiring equal political liberty and its fair value is an appropriate component of his theory of justice. (shrink)

There is a great deal that might be said about justice in property claims. The strategy that I shall employ focuses attention upon the initial acquisition of property -- the most sensitive and most interesting area of property theory. Every theory that discusses property claims favorably assumes that there is some justification for transforming previously unowned resources into property. It is often this assumption which has seemed, to one extent or another, to be vulnerable to attack by critics of particular (...) justifications of property. Nevertheless, this assumption is frequently left undefended by property theorists, and where it is defended, the defense is often remarkably weak. That some initial claim to property be defensible is required by any theory which holds that certain present distributions may be justified, that certain transfers of property are justified, or that restitution ought to be made for previous injustice in transfer or acquisition. The initial acquisition of property, and its justification, is crucial to the remainder of property theory. (shrink)

The word “justice” is used in several different ways. First, justice is sometimes understood as moral permissibility applied to distributions of benefits and burdens (e.g., income distributions) or social structures (e.g., legal systems). In this sense, justice is distinguished by the kind of entity to which it is applied, rather than a specific kind of moral concern.

Justice and Libertarianism The term ‘justice’ is commonly used in several different ways. Sometimes it designates the moral permissibility of political structures (such as legal systems). Sometimes it designates moral fairness (as opposed to efficiency or other considerations that are relevant to moral permissibility). Sometimes it designates legitimacy in the sense of it being morally impermissible for others to interfere forcibly with the act or omission (e.g., my failing to go to dinner with my mother may be wrong but nonetheless (...) legitimate). Finally, sometimes it designates what we owe each other in the sense of respecting everyone’s rights. Of course, these notions are closely related. What we owe each other may, but need not, be partly based on issues of fairness. Legitimacy and permissibility of political structures are largely, but perhaps not entirely, determined by what rights of non-interference individuals have. Nonetheless, these are distinct notions and we shall focus only on what we owe each other. Justice as what we owe each other is not concerned with impersonal duties (duties owed to no one, i.e., that do not correspond to anyone’s rights). If there are impersonal duties, then something can be just but nonetheless morally impermissible. For brevity, we shall often write of actions being permissible or agents having a moral liberty, but this should always be understood in the interpersonal sense of violating no one’s rights. Libertarianism is sometimes advocated as a derivative set of rules (e.g., derived from rule utilitarian or contractarian doctrines). Here, however, we reserve the term for the natural rights doctrine that agents initially fully own themselves. Agents are full self-owners just in case they own themselves in precisely the same way that they can fully own inanimate objects. Stated slightly differently, full self-owners own themselves in the same way that a full chattel-slaveowner owns a slave. Throughout, we are concerned with moral ownership and not legal ownership.. (shrink)

In this essay I defend the following prima facie argument: civic virtue is not dependent on integration and in fact may be best fostered under conditions of segregation. I demonstrate that civic virtue can and does take place under conditions of involuntary segregation, but that voluntary separation—as a response to segregation—is a more effective way to facilitate it. While segregation and disadvantage commonly coexist, spatial concentrations, particularly when there is a strong voluntary aspect present, often aid in fostering civic virtue. (...) Accordingly, so long as separation provides the conditions necessary for the promotion of civic virtue, integration is not an irreducible good. (shrink)

Over the past ten years or so, the position of Liberal Nationalism has progressed from being an apparent oxymoron to a widely accepted view. In this paper I sketch the most prominent liberal defenses of nationalism, focusing first on the difficulties of specifying criteria of nationhood, then criticizing what I take to be the most promising, culture-based defense, forwarded by Will Kymlicka. I argue that such an approach embroils one in a pernicious conservatism completely at odds with the global justice (...) concerns that I take to be central to liberalism with its core values of equality and liberty. (shrink)

In Book III, Part 2 of the Treatise, Hume presents a natural history of justice. Self-interest clearly plays a central role in his account; our ancestors invented justice conventions, he maintains, for the sake of reciprocal advantage. But this is not what makes his approach so novel and attractive. Hume recognizes that prudential considerations are not sufficient to explain how human beings – with our propensities towards temporal discounting and free-riding – could have established conventions for social exchange and collective (...) action in commercial societies. This leads him to develop an innovative account of the role that emotional aversions play in establishing trust between strategically rational agents. (shrink)

This essay defends a pragmatic approach to transitional justice by arguing that it provides a convincing view of the relationships between theory and practice and is true to the nature of democratic justice itself.

This article responds to Nir Eisikovits’ recent book Sympathizing with the Enemy: Reconciliation, Transitional Justice, Negotiation (Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 2010).