Psychological Jurisprudence as Deconstructionist Method: The Theory and Science of Virtue-Based Research

Abstract

For nearly thirty years, the theory and science of Psychological Jurisprudence (PJ) have been used to address a range of complex and controversial issues in crime, law, and justice. As a matter of epistemological and ontological commitments, PJ’s research agenda is sourced in an Aristotelian-derived virtue ethic. This ethic advances eudemonic existence. This existence extolls human flourishing and excellence and it recognizes that these eudemonic possibilities (i.e., flourishing and excellence) emerge from within relational habits of evolving character. Evidence of these habits is found within a society’s expressions of culture. These expressions include the symbols of shared consciousness, the discourses of inter-subjectivity, and the institutional and communal practices of mutual power. However, what has yet to be specified in the academic literature, is how PJ’s method of inquiry functions as a useful approach for undertaking qualitative research. In Section one, we summarize the philosophy of science (i.e., the science of being/becoming) that informs PJ’s methodology and we identify the hermeneutical process (i.e., critical textual analysis, CTA) that operationalizes this science. In Section two, we delineate the elements of PJ’s virtue-based deconstructionist method of inquiry, and we explain how these elements form a design for undertaking replicable aretaic research. In Section three, we provisionally discuss the type of findings that PJ-as-method produces, and we suggestively explain how these findings are relevant to existing debates about crime control and justice policy research, education, and training.