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A Theory of Justice
John Rawls
John Rawls stands as the most notable--and controversial--political
theorists of the twentieth-century. His 1971 work A Theory of
Justice redefined the status of political philosophy in the West,
giving central focus to the group of ideas surrounding the concept
of "liberalism." The liberal democrat state, Rawls argues here and
elsewhere, can and should be the guarantor of social justice. In A
Theory of Justice, Rawls sketches a complex and well-defined
notion of how such a state could make a positive impact in terms of
being redistributively just--that is, how a liberal democrat state
could insure that its members were provided with basic rights and
more or less equal opportunities. In later works, including Political
Liberalism, Rawls deals with the thorny issue of cultural pluralism,
and how a liberal state could hope to incorporate the life-plans of
many different cultures under one roof.
A Theory of Justice |
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Criminal Justice Ethics: Annotated Bibliography and Guide to Sources
Frank
Schmalleger ed. , Robert
McKenrick
ISBN: 0-313-26791-X, 136 pages
Greenwood Press ; March 30, 1991
The burgeoning interest in criminal justice ethics necessitates the compilation of this volume listing relevant materials published in North America after 1980. The use of available telecommunications and database resources facilitated the compilers' access to books, chapters in books, articles, commission reports, videotapes, professional and government codes, as well as unpublished books near completion, and ensured the inclusion of the most up-to-date and pertinent works. The sources cited focus on the American system of criminal justice, its theoretical framework, and the prominent issues that it faces.
http://www.praeger.com/books/BookDetail.asp?dept_id=1&sku=SCK/ |
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The Data of Ethics: Bound with Justice
by Herbert Spencer and Michael Taylor
March 1999: ISBN 1 85506 748 X
'Spencer regarded the Principles of Ethics - of which The Data
of Ethics and Justice constitutes parts one and four
respectively - as the culmination and crowning achievement of the
System of Synthetic Philosophy, to which the other volumes on biology,
psychology, and sociology had been mere preliminaries' - Michael Taylor,
from the Introduction. In Justice Spencer revisits the Law
of Equal Freedom which first appeared in Social Statics and
forms the keystone of social morality.
The Data of Ethics: Bound with Justice |
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Partial Reason: Critical and Constructive Transformations of Ethics and Epistemology
Author: Sally
E. Talbot
Proposes an original theory of the ethic of care, drawing insights from feminist and non-feminist critics of liberal moral theory, feminist ethics and epistemologies, and feminist postcolonial writing. Traditionally the ethic of care has been associated with women while the ethic of justice has been associated with men. In recent years some feminist philosophers have turned their energies to developing theories of care and to exploring the epistemological assumptions on which the ethic of care is based. This volume proposes an original theory of care, building on insights of both feminist and non-feminist critics of liberal moral theory, gleaning ideas from feminist ethics and epistemologies, and stimulated by the writings of post-colonial feminists. The author shows that a number of ethical and epistemological imperatives can be defined through the philosophical elaboration of an ethic of care and the endeavor to know and to care well. (Greenwood Press, 8/30/2000) ISBN: 0-313-31273-7. 248 pages.
http://www.praeger.com/books/BookDetail.asp?dept_id=1&sku=GM1273 |
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Truth v. Justice: The Morality of Truth Commissions
(Princeton University Press, 2000). Edited by Robert I. Rotberg and DennisThompson
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The truth commission is an increasingly common fixture of newly democratic states with repressive or strife-ridden pasts. From South Africa to Haiti, truth commissions are at work with varying degrees of support and success. To many, they are the best--or only--way to achieve a full accounting of crimes committed against fellow citizens and to prevent future conflict. Others question whether a restorative justice that sets the guilty free, that cleanses society by words alone, can deter future abuses and allow victims and their families to heal. Here, leading philosophers, lawyers, social scientists, and activists representing several perspectives look at the process of truth commissioning in general and in post-apartheid South Africa. They ask whether the truth commission, as a method of seeking justice after conflict, is fair, moral, and effective in bringing about reconciliation. |
http://www.princeton.edu/~uchv/ |
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Justice Will Be Done
by Joan McGregor (JOAN.MCGREGOR@asu.edu)
President Bush said that "justice will be done." All of us would like to see justice done in response to the horrific acts of terrorism perpetrated against innocent people in New York and Washington D.C.. We all experienced the terror, panic, fright of the events of September 11. Along with the fear and terror, we all experienced the terrific sense of sadness and sympathy for the victims and their families. No single event has so profoundly clutched our collective hearts. Hearing the descriptions of the individuals' life stories, individuals with families and hopes, futures that now wouldn't unfold in their own unique way, who hasn't cried for what should have been for those individuals. After the tears, we got angry and wanted justice.
What does justice mean in this context? Before we consider that we should be cautioned that anger and the desire for justice don't sit well together.
Justice Will Be Done |
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The Ethics Of Virtue Vs The Ethics Of Justice
by Professor Brenda Almond: The INDEPENDENT, 14 May 1999, Review p7
THE WAR in Yugoslavia has taken two important casualties: first, language and concepts, and second, morality itself. Take language, and first, consider the concept of accidental killing. Can this be extended to dropping cluster bombs from a plane through clouds at an unseen target? In what sense is it an accident if people below are killed? They are the wrong people? That's a mistake, certainly but is it an accident?
http://www.nationalism.org/sf/Articles/a167.html |
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Beyond Ethics to Justice through Levinas and Derrida: The Legacy of Levinas
by Robert
Manning. Paper - 193 pages (2001) ISBN: 081990996-3
In a series of insightful essays, Professor Manning discusses the issues raised by the post-modern turn toward ethical theory. He puts the recent writings of Jacques Derrida into dialogue with the thought of Emannuel Levinas in order to get at the question: How do we move from a theoretical ethical discourse to a practical notion of justice? This book will be of interest to students and scholars in the fields of philosophy and theology. Robert John Sheffler Manning is professor of theology and philosophy at Quincy University, in Quincy, Illinois. He is also the author of "Interpreting Otherwise Than Heiddeger."
http://www.qufranciscanpress.com/books.php/12 |
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Justice, Care, and Political Ethics
by Natalie Ashton, Princeton University
The effectiveness of great political action does not derive from obedience
to individual moral requirement. Indeed the majority of great
(and grave) political decisions are marked by their contrariety to
the dictates of private morality. According to theories of political
ethics, the politician is insulated from the bounds of individual
morality by the responsibilities, obligations, and freedoms attaching
to the official role. The actions of the political figure, such theories
assert, must be operative and evaluative upon a distinct value system.
In a quite pragmatic sense, the theory of political morality cast
by Max Weber, erected upon classical realist notions, values principles
of rationality and objectivity as fundamental to politics. Weber embraces
the Kantian conception of ethics as categorical and based upon a universal
principle, which for Weber's politician is the ethic of reason. Objectivity,
on Weber's account, is to be maintained through habituation and a
"firm taming of the soul." [W 115] This prescription evidences Weber's
model as a typically masculine approach to moral reasoning,
according to the theory of gender difference in morality. The Kantian
influence of Weber's classical realist construction of political ethics,
in its one-dimensional, myopic postulation of normative requirement,
condemns relational forms of moral judgment; thus, it structurally
bars the inclusion and consideration of the domestic and as we shall
see, supposedly feminine moral perspective in positive conceptions
of the moral political leader.
This paper will argue against the universalist construction of the classical realist model of political ethics, as delivered by Max Weber, to assert the practical and empirical necessity of a structural reconceptualization of morality in the realm of politics. This essay will argue that Weber's account is not only gender-biased in its construction, but it is, in its universalist simplicity, empirically incorrect and pragmatically inconsistent.
http://www.lehigh.edu/~inosophy/armsashton.htm |
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Anachronism of the Moral Sentiments? Integrity, Post-Modernism and Justice
James Boyle
This is an essay about the relationship between post-modernism and justice. My topic is the apparent disjunction between post-modernists' moral and political intuitions on the one hand and their philosophical views and cultural leanings on the other. Crudely put, the essay asks what we can learn from the fact that someone who rejects the notion of "integrity" as either a psychological, moral or textual quality, nevertheless condemns the Dean or the Senator for having "no integrity," admires the display of principled consistency in public life or the interpretation of the Constitution, and would characterise the difference between, say, Nelson Mandela and Bill Clinton, as the difference between a principled ascetic who would endure jail or death for his beliefs and a pack of cut-out caricatures, reshuffled at every shift in public opinion, held together only by an expensive suit and a set of selfish appetites.
http://www.law.duke.edu/boylesite/pomo.htm |
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Justice: Ancient And Modern
Wilson Carey McWilliams 1980
Justice, Aristotle wrote, is the political good and the highest political virtue. Law regulates politics. Consequently, law-making is the highest form of politics, and giving a people its fundamental laws is the greatest test of statecraft. Justice, however, judges laws. We design laws hoping that they will be just and we argue that particular "unjust" laws ought to be changed. Even regimes which are relatively "lawless," scorning the restraint of constitutions, claim that it is unjust to follow rigid, outdated laws. The Soviet Union, for example, appeals to the Marxist "science" of history, claiming that what history commands is just and suspends ordinary law. The defenders of any constitution, Aristotle observed, will claim that it is just. Justice, like love, has many meanings. I will be discussing two radically different ideas of justice, one which derives from ancient Greece and from Christianity and Judaism, and the second, which grew out of the Renaissance and the rise of commercial and industrial civilization.
http://www.iscv.org/Civic_Values/civic_values.html |
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Robert Nozick: Against Distributive Justice
by R.J. Kilcullen
In this article. Nozick sets three rules of justice, defining:
- how things not previously possessed by anyone may be acquired;
- how possession may be transferred from one person to
another; and
- what must be done to rectify injustices arising
from violations of (1) and (2).
A distribution is just if it has arisen in accordance with these three sets of rules.
Robert Nozick: Against Distributive Justice |
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A Humean Theory
of Distributive Justice for a New Century
Sheldon Wein
Saint Mary's University (sheldon.wein@stmarys.ca)
This paper suggests a strategy for constructing a contemporary Humean theory of distributive justice which would serve to ground what I call an entrepreneurial welfare state. It is argued that blending David Hume's insights about the origins and purposes of justice with Ronald Dworkin's insurance-based reasoning supporting his equality of resources model of distributive justice will yield a state which, as a matter of justice, encourages its members to engage in entrepreneurial activities and which protects them from the worst extremes of market economies.
A Humean Theory
of Distributive Justice for a New Century |
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How Responsible Is 'Responsive' Government?
Economy
and Society, 1 August 2002, vol. 31, no. 3, pp. 461-482(22) Rohr
J. A.
The work of John Rohr focuses primarily upon the constitutional dimension of the work of public servants, most particularly, but not exclusively, career civil servants employed in central government. In stressing public service ethics as a form of constitutional practice Rohr's aim is to help reinforce the legitimate role of career public servants in government and to remind practising public bureaucrats (and academics and politicians) of the nobility of the 'administrative vocation' of state service, a somewhat daunting task in today's political climate. In this article I examine Rohr's work to see what ethical light it might throw upon recent and ongoing political attempts to make the British public administration more 'responsive'. I do so, first, by outlining the main themes of Rohr's work and their location within the US constitutional tradition. I then proceed to discuss the extent to which they translate into other constitutional contexts. Finally, I attempt to put Rohr's work to use in discussing aspects of civil service reform in Britain under recent Conservative administrations and that of the present New Labour government.
How Responsible Is 'Responsive' Government? |
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Distributive Justice
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Principles of distributive justice are normative principles designed to allocate goods in limited supply relative to demand. The principles vary in numerous dimensions. They vary in what goods are subject to distribution (income, wealth, opportunities, etc.); on the nature of the subjects of the distribution (natural persons, groups of persons, reference classes, etc.); and on what basis the goods should be distributed (equality, according to individual characteristics, according to free market transactions, etc.).
This entry will focus on principles of distributive justice designed to cover the distribution of material goods and services to individuals. Principles of this kind have been the dominant source of Anglo-American debate on distributive justice over the last three decades.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/justice-distributive/ |
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