Justice Reasoning Research Articles

Contract Law and Reasons of Social Justice

The view that contract law should do social justice deserves closer and more charitable attention than it has been given in theoretical debates. In particular, resistance to that view is often due to misunderstandings about the nature of social justice and the interests it protects; the kind of impact that contract law can make on the social structure and the demands that this would involve for individual transacting agents, and; the relation between structure-sensitive and structure-insensitive principles for the enforcement of voluntary transactions. Once these misunderstandings are dealt with, taking contract law to aim for social justice seems a no less plausible or attractive a view than most other grand normative theories of contract.

Section 7, Insite and the Comptence of Courts

In the Insite case, the plaintiffs came to court with a very specific end in mind: to preserve the Insite safe-injecting facility. They did so for reasons of substantive justice: they wanted to protect drug users from the dangers of injection in the back alleys of the Downtown Eastside and to mitigate the harms common to that drug use—virulent infections and the risk of death from overdose.

Cultural differences in justificatory reasoning

Justificatory reasoning, the ability to justify one’s beliefs and actions, is an important goal of education. We develop a scale to measure the three forms of justificatory reasoning – absolutism, relativism, and evaluativism – before validating the scale across two cultures and domains. The results show that the scale possessed validity and reliability. With astrology as domain, Western students preferred evaluativism, but Eastern students favoured relativism. However, with adultery as domain, both student cohorts preferred absolutism. Also, compared with Western students, Eastern students were less likely to engage in and more likely to avoid controversial discussions. The findings indicate that culture may influence justificatory reasoning forms, but not with moral domains such as adultery. Collectively, the results also suggest that teachers should not unconditionally aim to develop evaluativism in students, supposedly the highest form of justificatory reasoning by Western standards. They further reinforce researchers caution not to associate collectivism with lack of evaluativistic reasoning skills.

Peak Oil, Energy Descent, and the Fate of Consumerism

Western-style consumer lifestyles are highly resource and energy intensive. This paper examines the energy intensity of these consumer lifestyles and considers whether such lifestyles could be sustained in a future with declining energy supplies and much higher energy prices. The rise of consumer societies since the industrial revolution has only been possible due to the abundant supply of cheap fossil fuels - most notably, oil - and the persistence of consumer societies depend upon continued supply, for reasons that will be explained. But recently there has been growing concern that the world is reaching, or has already reached, its peak in oil production, despite demand for oil still expected to grow considerably. Put more directly, many analysts believe that demand for oil is very soon expected to outstrip supply, with a recent study by the US military reporting that, globally, spare productive capacity could entirely dry up by 2012 and by 2015 demand for oil could outstrip supply by almost 10 million barrels per day. What this means - even allowing for some uncertainty in timing and extent - is that the world is soon to face a situation where economic and geopolitical competition escalates over access to increasingly scarce oil supplies. One consequence of this (a consequence already playing out) is that oil will get more expensive. Since oil is the ultimate foundation of industrial economies, when it gets more expensive, all commodities get more expensive, and this dynamic will have pervasive implications on the globalised economy and the high consumption lifestyles that fully depend on that economy.This paper reviews the current energy supply situation and considers the fate of consumer lifestyles in the context of an imminent stagnation and eventual decline in oil supplies. The primary purpose of this paper is to outline why the global consumer class should at once begin preparing itself for a significant downscaling of the highly energy and resource intensive lifestyles that are widely celebrated today. Such downscaling is desirable for environmental and social justice reasons, but the present focus will be on how oil supply may soon enforce such downscaling, whether it is desirable or not. While this externally imposed downscaling of lifestyles will be a great and unpleasant cultural shock for all those who do not anticipate it, this paper concludes by considering whether members of the global consumer class could actually benefit from voluntarily embracing a ‘simpler life’ of reduced energy and resource consumption. Although energy supply issues have the very real potential to cause unprecedented human suffering, it will be argued that, if handled wisely, the forced transition away from energy-intensive consumer lifestyles (whether due to peak oil, climate change, or broader resource constraints) could actually lead humanity down a more meaningful, just, and sustainable path, such that we should want to choose this path even if it were not to be forced upon us in coming decades. But it is important to understand that we must leave consumer lifestyles before they leave us, for if we wait for them to be taken from us by force of circumstances, the transition beyond them will not be a blessing but a curse.

Transformational Leadership and Leaders’ Mode of Care Reasoning

Previous research on the moral foundations of transformational leadership has focused primarily on stage of justice reasoning; this study focuses on developmental mode of care reasoning. Multilevel regression analyses were conducted on data coded from interviews with a sample of Canadian public sector managers (N = 58) and survey responses from their subordinates (N = 119). Results indicated that managers’ developmental mode of care reasoning significantly and positively predicted subordinates’ reports of transformational (but not transactional) leadership, with significant differences in follower reports of transformational leadership between those using more versus less advanced modes of care reasoning. Conceptual implications for understanding transformational leadership and the ethics of leadership, directions for future research, and suggestions for leadership interventions are discussed.

Identification, Meaning, and the Normativity of Social Roles

Abstract: We are all familiar with the way in which social roles, such as mother, father, professor, club football coach, citizen, and so on, confront us with clusters of duties that purport to bind us. Though we generally experience these role‐duties as normatively binding, we might question this. What reason do role‐occupants have for conforming to the duties that define their roles? I argue that the agent who identifies with her role thereby has a weighty and important justificatory reason for conforming to the role's defining duties: namely, the identifying agent realizes the fundamental goods of meaning and self‐determination by doing so. This is an important normative ground of role‐duties because it, unlike the grounds of natural duty or voluntary assumption, ensures that the duties it grounds are not alien impositions but rather are elements of the identifying agent's wellbeing. I also argue that role‐identification provides a reason that shares many of the characteristics of a moral reason, and I argue that role‐identification in tandem with the principle of fair play grounds a moral duty to conform to one's role‐duties.

The Nature of Law: Three Problems with One Solution

Whether or not we have ourselves studied the philosophy of law, most of us are familiar with the fact that philosophical debate concerning the nature of law has been around since Ancient Greece. In much the same way, there have been long-running philosophical debates concerning justice, truth, reason and a host of other issues. The debate concerning law is in some respects different, however. For it is not too difficult to see how the nature of justice or truth or reason could give rise to a specifically philosophical debate, while it is far from clear why the nature of law should generate any philosophical puzzlement at all.

Communicating Results of Community-Based Participatory Research

The way in which the results of community-based participatory research are presented is extremely important, both for reasons of justice and cultural sensitivity and to ensure that they not unnecessarily badly received. Virtual Mentor is a monthly bioethics journal published by the American Medical Association.

Why Relational Egalitarians Should Care About Distributions

Relational views of equality, such as those put forward by Elizabeth Anderson and Samuel Scheffler, argue for a social and political ideal of equality that aims at being a better interpretation of what social justice requires than the prevailing distributive conceptions of equality, espe cially luck egalitarian views. Yet so far the criticisms raised by relational egalitarians against luck egalitarians have attracted a lot more attention than their own positive proposals; in particular, it is unclear what social justice as relational equality demands in distributive terms. Anderson's discussions of the topic suggest that relational egalitarianism vacates a large part of the terrain of distributive justice in favor of a minimalist, sufficiency view.1 Scheffler, on the other hand, has not so far spelled out the distributive implications of his view on relationship equality in any detail.2 This paper delivers an internal argument against Anderson's view, and argues that a relational egalitarian conception of social justice yields powerful intrinsic and instrumental reasons of justice to care about distributive inequality in socially produced goods—despite its according center stage to just social relationships and not to the distribution of goods per se. The paper is motivated by sympathy for the relational egalitarian view; however, its aim is not to argue for it against rival views—such as luck egalitarianism—but rather to first clarity what kind of view it is, and what connections it has to distributive justice, since this has not so far been adequately done. Section 1 explains that relational egalitarianism as understood in this paper puts forward an ideal of social justice, not a social ideal of equality independent of justice, and introduces the problem of its connection to

Ethik und christliche Identit�t bei Gregor von Nyssa (review)

Reviewed by: Ethik und christliche Identität bei Gregor von Nyssa Jonathan J. Armstrong Sandra Leuenberger-Wenger. Ethik und christliche Identität bei Gregor von Nyssa. Studien und Texte zu Antike und Christentum, 49. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008. The present monograph represents a revised version of the author's doctoral dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of Zürich in 2007. Leuenberger-Wenger introduces her study by reflecting on the interrelation between ethics and Christian identity in the theology of Gregory of Nyssa. The very foundational question in Aristotle's ethics ("What is the good life?") presupposes an answer to the theological question: "What is the end of man?" The author explains succinctly: "The question of the good life is the question of who man is and where the purpose and meaning of his existence is to be found" (1). The coordinates of biblical theology and classical philosophy serve to orient this study of Gregory of Nyssa. In Part One, Leuenberger-Wenger reviews Gregory's sermons and paints a portrait of his ethics for the community. In Part Two, the author discusses Gregory's theological treatises and explores his ethics for individuals. Poverty, alms, extortion, vulgarity, sexuality, social policy, and slavery are some of the themes in Gregory's preaching that Leuenberger-Wenger examines in Part One. Those in Gregory's church were frequently recent converts to Christianity, and Gregory could not assume that they had been raised in a Christian environment. The congregants were poor—financially as well as intellectually—and Gregory consciously followed the Christian tradition of paideia in his preaching in order to supply for his listeners some elementary education. Gregory labored to [End Page 650] alleviate the material poverty of the congregation, preaching passionately on the virtue of Christian charity. His depictions of the plight of the poor are horrific. The poor were treated like animals—less than animals in fact, for the rich treated their house animals with more compassion than the city beggars. The stories that Gregory tells in his sermons reveal a certain intimacy with the poor of the city, and he insists that these miserable creatures were people in possession of reason and deserving of justice. The author notes: "In Gregory's portrayal of the poor, it is clear that his purpose is to show how undeserved the plight of the sick and the poor is, as well as the contempt shown to them. Gregory identifies natural disasters, wars, and disease as the causes of their poverty" (53). According to Leuenberger-Wenger, Gregory also advances a surprisingly negative and modern view of institutional slavery. Slavery is to be condemned, Gregory decries, because it places a material price on people, their rationality, and their souls, asking, "Is there any difference in these matters between the slave and the one who rules over him?...Do they not have the same bodily organs? Will they not both become ashes in death? Is there not one judgment? Are not the kingdom and hell both common to all?" (103). Although Gregory stood against slavery, he also opposed revolt as a means to achieve social justice and therefore he stopped short of advocating the abolition of slavery. For this failure, Gregory has drawn much criticism from modern scholars. Gregory addresses other issues as well, including the enslavement to sexual lust, gluttony, and fasting. Leuenberger- Wenger's thesis is perhaps best substantiated in the second part of the book when she turns to examine Gregory's ethical instructions to those who are advanced in Christian discipline. As she then notes, according to Gregory, Christian maturity means never to stop striving for perfection: "Virtue as the fulfillment of human existence and its destiny is a central theme for Gregory. Virtue brings human nature to perfection and lets it bloom like a flower" (178). The book would be worth reading for Sandra Leuenberger-Wenger's careful analysis of Gregory's homilies alone. The author repeatedly points out that in his preaching Gregory adopts the rhetorical structures he learned during his classical education. The author also expends a great deal of effort in demonstrating that Gregory's ethical conclusions are in fundamental agreement with Greek philosophy. In this respect...

Does care reasoning make a difference? Relations between care, justice and dispositional empathy

The aim of this study was to investigate relationships between care and justice reasoning, dispositional empathy variables and meta‐ethical thinking among 128 students from a university of applied sciences. The measures were Skoe’s Ethic of Care Interview, the Defining Issues Test, Davis’s Interpersonal Reactivity Index and Meta‐Ethical Questionnaire. The results showed that levels of care reasoning were positively related to the post‐conventional schema and negatively related to the personal interest schema in justice reasoning. Age, meta‐ethical thinking, the post‐conventional schema and perspective taking predicted care reasoning. Sympathy was positively related to both modes of moral reasoning among men and predicted their care reasoning. The results point out common elements for care and justice reasoning, underscore the importance of perspective taking for moral reasoning and indicate that the relationship between affective‐based empathy and moral reasoning is gender‐specific and far more complex than previous theories suggest.

When deserving translates into causing: The effect of cognitive load on immanent justice reasoning

In immanent justice reasoning, negative events are attributed to some prior moral failing, even in the absence of a physically plausible causal link between them. Drawing on just-world theory, we examined immanent justice reasoning as an intuitive, deservingness-guided form of causal judgment. Participants were exposed to a story about a man who either did or did not cheat on his wife and who was subsequently injured in a car accident. Under either high or low cognitive load, participants rated the extent to which they believed the accident was the result of the man's prior moral failings. The results showed that participants causally attributed the man's accident to his prior conduct when he was immoral (vs. not immoral) more strongly under high cognitive load. Further, moderated mediation analyses showed that perceived deservingness of the accident mediated the effect of the man's prior immoral behavior on immanent justice attributions more strongly under high cognitive load. These results offer support for the notion that immanent justice attributions reflect an automatic tendency to assume that people get what they deserve.

Multicultural claims and equal respect

In this article the author intends to provide general normative guidelines which ought to inform policies concerning the most controversial multicultural claims for a liberal democracy. In order to do that, she proposes a general reconsideration of the struggle of cultures and identities which makes up the stuff of multiculturalism. She suggests that instead of focusing on the issue of compatibility, the adequate viewpoint from which considering multicultural claims should be justice and, within justice, the principle of equal respect (ER). The reference to ER is widespread in the literature on multiculturalism, but it does not specify what should be the object of ER: persons and their dignity, or cultures/religions/identities and their members? The alternative is then examined and the author argues in favour of an interpretation of ER for persons which considers persons as they are, given their identities and differences. Finally, the author provides a typology of multicultural claims, ranked on a scale of different levels of disrespect, which consequently require different kinds of response. As a result, one is invited to reflect on the how beside the what, on the procedures and attitudes beside the benefits and measures, and not only for the pragmatic reasons of finding a relatively easy way out, but also for principled reasons of justice.

Transformational leadership and leader moral orientation: Contrasting an ethic of justice and an ethic of care

Previous research on the moral foundations of transformational leadership has focused on a Kohlbergian (1969, 1976) ethic of justice. However, proposed associations between level of justice reasoning and transformational leadership have received only partial support. We reasoned that an ethic of care would be more consistent with the nature of transformational leadership than would be an ethic of justice. Multilevel regression analyses on data obtained from a sample of leaders ( N = 55) and followers ( N = 391) at a Canadian university supported our predictions. Specifically, leader propensity toward using an ethic of care was significantly, positively related to follower perceptions of transformational (but not transactional) leadership. Leader propensity toward an ethic of justice was significantly, positively related to follower perceptions of transactional (but not transformational) leadership. Conceptual, research, and practical implications are discussed.

Empirical relationships between beauty and justice: Testing Scarry and elaborating Danto.

Elaine Scarry (1999) proposes a correspondence between engagement with beauty and a sense of justice.Parallel to Scarry, Arthur Danto (2003) posits that 20th century artists avoided producing beautiful worksbecause of an offended sense of justice. In Study 1, the relationship between justice reasoning (DIT2;Rest et al., 1999a) and engagement with beauty (Diessner et al., 2008) is examined; there is a significantraw correlation ( r .23; p .05; N 132), which reduced to a nonsignificant r .01 when Opennessto Experience was partialed out. Study 2 examines the relationship between fairness as a characterstrength (cf. Peterson & Seligman, 2004) and engagement with beauty, finding a raw r .35, p .001(N 113). After partialing out Openness to Experience the r is .25, significant at p .009. Althoughthere is no significant association between justice reasoning and engagement with beauty, whenjustice/fairness is viewed as a character strength, Scarry’s hypothesis is empirically validated. Thus,justice-minded artists need not avoid beauty, as beautiful art may increase viewers’ sensitivity to justice.Keywords: beauty, justice, DIT, character strengths, trait fairness

Grócio E a Ética Da Lei Natural

Grotius, the 17th century European philosopher, is a landmark in the Enlightnment Thought, considering the role of Justice and Law in a society that is ruled by the Natural Law, that is the law that is previous to the law draft by man and inspire and legitimatize it. Grotius believed that according with the perfectioning of Man a socety will come on which peace will prevail as Man acquire the abality to act according with its conscience, that is Reason and Sense of Justice. The next three hundred years of history of Mankind quickly contradited the idealism of Grotius but his inheritors, the international jurists, defend that in a system based on international rules, where nations are judged by their conformity to the international law, peace and security will, definitively, prevail.

Reproductive healthcare systems should include accessible infertility diagnosis and treatment: An important challenge for resource-poor countries

Infertility is a central issue in the lives of many couples who suffer from it. In resource-poor countries the problem of childlessness is even more pronounced compared with Western societies owing to different sociocultural circumstances. It often leads to severe psychological, social, and economic suffering, and access to infertility treatment is often limited to certain procedures and certain costumers. The issue of infertility in resource-poor countries is underestimated and neglected, not only by local governments but also by the international nonprofit organizations. Simplification of the diagnostic and therapeutic procedures, minimizing the complication rate, and incorporating fertility centers into existing reproductive healthcare programs are essential measures to take in resource-poor countries if infertility treatment is to be accessible for a large part of the population. For reasons of social justice, a search for strategies to implement simplified methods of infertility diagnosis and treatment in resource-poor countries is urgently warranted.

道徳的価値観から見た高校生の環境問題に対する認識

The purpose of this study is to grasp actual conditions of high school students' understanding of environmental problems from the viewpoint of moral values by a questionnaire survey. It has already been cleared by sociological studies and social psychological studies that high morality (which has almost same meaning as moral values) are very important and useful in solving environmental problems which have become a social dilemma for many people. The targets of this study are students of Kanagawa prefectural high school. Their actual conditions were evaluated by five evaluation standards of moral values, i.e. 1 Justice Reasoning, 2 Role-taking Ability, 3 Respect for Life, 4 Normative Consciousness and 5 Moralistic Action Force. Environmental problems were classified into four categories, i.e. “Regional and Global Environment”, “Nature and Creatures”, “Resources/Energy” and“Others (Common Consideration) ”. Results were given as follows: 1 The score of“Nature and Creatures” was clearly higher than those of other categories. 2 However, as for the questions regarding tax and others which are levied forcibly, even they were belonging to“Nature and Creatures”, the score was clearly low.

Republicanism and human rights: a plausible combination?

I consider a small but growing corner of the global justice literature: conceptions of human rights advanced under republican lights. I outline three recent republican justificatory arguments for principles of global justice embodied in human rights: Stuart White's appeal to the republican emphasis on civic virtue, and the appeals to a republican conception of liberty advanced by Philip Pettit and James Bohman. I argue that in all three accounts, too little attention is paid to constraints on the reasons that can be offered to a diverse domain of agents. I sketch an outline of the criteria plausible justificatory reasons must contain. In the appeal to virtue, no such reasons are forthcoming. In the appeal to liberty, such reasons may be forthcoming if republicans give up the claim that human rights are justified by appeal to ‘liberty’ itself. I conclude that a suitably modified appeal to the republican conception of liberty may be plausible.

Hobby Ranching and Chile's Land‐reform Legacy*

ABSTRACT. Twentieth‐century land reform in Chile reflects familiar themes. The state subdivided large land monopolies, ostensibly for social justice reasons: to provide opportunities for campesinos to earn a living from agriculture. In southern Chile's Tierra del Fuego a combination of social justice, nationalism, and geopolitical concerns stimulated land reform between 1924 and 1978. The effort succeeded in creating a new material landscape oriented around smaller ranches but failed to meet its socioeconomic goals. In a scenario that resonates with reforms elsewhere in Latin America, an elitist cultural landscape dominated by large‐holding corporations was replaced with another elitist landscape, though in a different form. Politically well‐connected and essentially absentee landholders acquired subdivided land and began to practice “hobby ranching.” The history of land reform in Tierra del Fuego demonstrates how new socioeconomic conditions created over the course of many decades have left their imprint on land use and the biophysical landscape. It also contributes to larger regional debates about the role of land degradation in stocking‐rate decline.