Scope Of Justice Research Articles

Democratic Justice and the Boundaries Problem

This article examines the way in which Albert Weale's procedural account of democratic justice understands: (1) the boundaries of the democratic social contract, in terms of who is included or excluded from the contract; and (2) the boundaries of justice (i.e. the scope of entitlements and obligations of justice) that result from the contract. Either Weale's empirical method justifies the problematic exclusion of certain groups of agents from the democratic contract and thus potentially from the scope of justice, or his method is not as empirical as Weale wants it to be, because in order to evaluate those exclusions as unjust and to prevent them, the theory needs to postulate thick moral standards that are independent from, and external to, democratic procedures. Furthermore, the boundaries of justice resulting from Weale's empirical-contractarian theory are likely to lead to the absence of justice where it would be most needed, especially at the international level. These concerns notwithstanding, Weale's book remains a highly significant contribution to both democratic theory and theories of justice, as well as to our understanding of the relationship between them.

Animals and the political in Lucy Hutchinson and Margaret Cavendish

In the introduction to his edition of Hutchinson's translation of Lucretius, David Norbrook suggests that Lucretius' materialism underlies Hutchinson's interest in the relationship between animals and humans in Order and Disorder.1 While Hutchinson explicitly disavowed aspects of Lucretius' work that she translated, for example his atheism and his graphic account of human sexuality, she engaged deeply with his thinking concerning animals - at times taking his positions even further in her translation and exploring their implications in her own epic, Order and Disorder. My investigation of Hutchinson's interest in animals, which has not yet received scholarly attention, will build upon and extend Laurie Shannon's recent discussion in Accommodated Animal: Cosmopolity in Shakespearean Locales of what she calls early modern zoo-topia in Shakespeare's plays -a place well populated with [animals] and marked by more pervasive cognizance of their presence than modern Western culture largely affords.2 Especially relevant for this analysis is Shannon's emphasis on the political idiom to characterize the relationship between humans and animals - based on a constitutionalist sense of legitimated capacities, authorities, and rights that set animals within the scope of justice and the span of political imagination (5). Both Shannon and Keith Thomas, in his earlier and encyclopedic Man and the Natural World: A History of the Modern Sensibility, mention Margaret Cavendish's writings on animals - though they are silent on Hutchinson's.3 Yet just as Cavendish's association with Pierre Gassendi and his Epicurean atomism parallels Hutchinson's immersion in Lucretius' atomism, so their writings concerning animals level the accepted hierarchy of human over animal with significant political implications, as I will show. In doing so, I will place both Cavendish and Hutchinson in the context of classical and early modern thinkers and writers on animals, such as Ovid, Plutarch, Montaigne, Du Bartas, Descartes, Gascoigne, William Cavendish, and above all, their English contemporary, Milton.Cavendish's animalsMargaret Cavendish's more widely known and noticed interest in animals is best represented in her poems, The Hunting of the Hare and The Hunting of the Stag, which appear contiguously in her Poems and Fancies.4 Donna Landry remarks that Cavendish capitalized on the traditional link between English poetry and hunting to achieve some of her best verse, and that she closely describes the habits and behaviour of the and the stag, in what she calls manner that is ecologically aware.5 But what is most notable in these poems is that despite her status as an aristocrat, one of whose privileges was hunting, Cavendish dramatizes the panic and fear that the hunted animals experience.In The Hunting of the Hare, Cavendish individualizes the from the first line, by giving him name, Wat. She echoes Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis where Venus counsels Adonis to hunt timorous flying hare (674) rather than the boar that she fears will - and indeed does - bring about his death.6 Elsewhere in Poems and Fancies, Cavendish states, according to the constitution of my Sex, I am as fearefull as Hare.7 She follows Shakespeare's Venus in calling the poor Wat (696), but while Shakespeare frames the grief of the dew-bedabbled wretch (701, 703) within Venus' advice to Adonis to hunt it, Cavendish echoes Shakespeare in order to criticize Venus' exhortation to Pursue these fearful creatures (678). Cavendish, by contrast, does not instrumentalize the hare; rather, her entire poem focuses on the hare's subjectivity. In fact, while Venus presents poor Wat as suitable prey for Adonis, Cavendish repeatedly addresses the as poor Wat, recalling Virgil's second-person address, infelix Dido, which expresses empathy with his tragic heroine (e.g., 4.450). Indeed, Virgil in well-known simile compares Dido to hunted hind (4. …

‘Just food’. The normative obligations of private agrifood governance

Global agrifood governance faces enormous environmental and social challenges that demand the development of effective, just, and legitimate solutions. In this context, private governance institutions, in the form of private standards and certification schemes, have developed into a major institutional response in the pursuance of sustainable agrifood development. While International Relations and political theory have examined private governance institutions in agrifood from the perspective of democratic legitimacy and problem-solving effectiveness, surprisingly little attention has been paid on their relationship to questions of equity and justice, however. As a result we lack systematic understanding of the justice concerns raised by private governance; we cannot effectively address injustice in agrifood governance; and we lack guidance on principles that can attribute ethical responsibilities to private institutions. This paper makes an attempt to outline the basis for a normative framework on agrifood governance, in general, and private agrifood governance, more specifically by delineating: (a) the reasons why private governance institutions fall under the scope of justice; (b) the principles, subjects and dimensions of just private agrifood governance; and (c) institutional transformations to foster agrifood justice.

Breaking down biocentrism: two distinct forms of moral concern for nature.

Breaking down biocentrism: two distinct forms of moral concern for nature.

Prenatal Equality of Opportunity

AbstractIn this article, we defend a normative theory of prenatal equality of opportunity, based on a critical revision of Rawls's principle of fair equality of opportunity (FEO). We argue that if natural endowments are defined as biological properties possessed at birth and the distribution of natural endowments is seen as beyond the scope of justice, Rawls's FEO allows for inequalities that undermine the social conditions of a property‐owning democracy. We show this by considering the foetal programming of disease and the possibility of germ‐line modifications. If children of lower socioeconomic background are more likely to develop in a poor foetal environment and germ‐line enhancements are available only to the rich, initial inequalities between the rich and the poor would grow, and yet FEO would be satisfied. In order to avoid the problem, we propose a revised FEO principle omitting any reference to the comparison of natural endowments. Our revised FEO requires that institutions mitigate social class effect from reproduction and gestation to the greatest extent compatible with parental freedoms and the value of the family.

Is the capability approach a sufficient challenge to distributive accounts of global justice?

I begin by discussing forms of cosmopolitanism that motivate challenges to distributive accounts of global justice. I then use Sen's version of the capabilities approach to show how distributive accounts fall short, why an overarching theory of justice is not needed, and that democracy understood as the exercise of public reasoning can do the work of identifying and addressing injustices. That said in favor of Sen, I argue that his account fails to attend to the kinds of injustices emerging from relationships of power and the institutions and structures in which these relationships are embedded. To show this, I outline features of a feminist relational approach, which I then apply to Canada's attempt to address historic harms through the Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission. While I agree with Sen that we do not need a theory of global justice that is universal, ideal, impartial, or abstracted from context, I aim to broaden the scope of justice beyond both distributive accounts and Sen's version of the capabilities approach.

Listening to the avant-garde

In her book Global Justice and Avant-Garde Political Agency , Lea Ypi revisits the debate over the scope of justice between cosmopolitans and statists, which has been constitutive of the field of international normative theory. Against statists, Ypi defends the global scope of egalitarian principles of justice, deriving them from a causally fundamental relationship between relative and absolute deprivation. Against cosmopolitans, she demonstrates that associative political relations play an essential role in implementing egalitarian principles of global justice and that condemnations of the state by cosmopolitans are both unnecessary and ill-advised. Advocating what she calls ‘statist cosmopolitanism,’ whereby domestic ‘avant-garde’ agents intervene politically so as to constrain and motivate fellow-citizens to support cosmopolitan transformations, the book offers a dialectical account of political theory in an activist mode. (Published: 4 July 2013) Citation: Ethics & Global Politics, Vol. 6 , No. 2, 2013, pp. 101107. http://dx.doi.org/10.3402/egp.v6i2.21317

The Practice-Dependence Red Herring and Substantive Reasons for Restricting the Scope of Justice

A number of views about the scope of justice in this debate have come to be grouped together under the heading of 'practice-dependence' in the literature. This is because they have something special to say about the relationship of moral principles to a practice. There are three questions that I wish to consider here. The first (sections 3 and 4) is whether there is a distinctive approach, different from standard moral reasoning that can be described as 'practice-dependence.' I shall argue that there is, both in human rights theory and in justice theory. The second (section 5) is whether that view is plausible in the light of an important moral test. That is a test for justifiability of a methodological premise when using such a premise in an account of justice will have a significant substantive upshot (an upshot affecting the entitlements and obligations people can be said to have). I argue that the practice-dependence view fails this test quite dramatically. In fact the approach has very little going for it in terms of rational motivation. Thirdly (section 6), I will consider whether the practice-dependence approach has been rightly attributed, by endorsers and critics of the approach alike, to moral theorists who put forward principles of justice that have social, or institutional, triggering conditions. These include Dworkin and Rawls. In answer to this I show that a number of theorists that have been identified as having practice-dependent approaches, both by endorsers and by critics of the approach, do not share in the distinctive premises of the approach. They in fact hold views incompatible with those, practice-dependence premises. In the concluding section (section 7), I argue that not only is the practice-dependence approach lacking in rational motivation and wrongly attributed to a particular group of theorists, it also distracts attention away from what is at stake in the scope-of-justice debate. By focusing on apparently methodological premises, the account overlooks the value-based reasons a theory might have for restricting the scope of principles of justice. Plausible value-based approaches exist, yet these have been mistakenly described as practice-dependence views in the literature, which has generated confusion as to their methodological commitments. Once properly understood, I argue, these views have the merit of at least addressing the justifiability test, which practice-dependence views do not. For those reasons, I conclude that practice-dependence is a red herring, raising more questions than it answers, for the global justice debate.

Hume and mutual advantage

Hume’s theory of justice is commonly regarded by contemporary theorists of justice as a theory of justice as mutual advantage. It is thus widely thought to manifest all the unattractive features of such theories: in particular, it is thought to endorse the exclusion of people with serious mental or physical disabilities from the scope and protection of justice and to justify the European expropriation of the lands of defenceless aboriginal people. I argue that this reading of Hume is mistaken. Mutual advantage is only part of Hume’s theory, the part that explains the origins of the institutions of justice in a general sense (property and promise keeping), and it is bracketed off from those parts of Hume’s theory that explain who is included within the scope of justice, how much each receives, and why and to whom we have a duty to be just. The interpretation of Hume’s theory as a theory of justice as mutual advantage not only fails to convey Hume’s complex purposes, but it portrays Hume’s theory of justice as the kind of theory he was most concerned to refute.

Scarce justice

The scarcity of resources required to produce justice is manifested in the relation between the accuracy, depth, and scope of materially possible forms of justice. Ceteris paribus, increases in the accuracy of justice must come at the expense of its depth and scope, and vice versa, though they are not linearly proportioned. The accuracy of justice is the degree of agreement between the possible results of attempts to implement a theory or principles of justice and the desired result according to that theory or those principles of justice. The scope of justice measures how broadly the principle or theory of justice is intended to apply. The depth of justice measures the gap between existing social norms and the theory or principles of justice we examine within the specified scope. This three-dimensional model explains public policies, laws, and regulations that increase the scope or depth of justice at the cost of a decrease in its accuracy – rough forms of justice such as measures of transitional justice, affirmative action, mandatory sentencing, simplified tax codes, collective guilt and victimhood, and general amnesties. The scarcity of resources necessary for justice can contract or expand. The normative choice between principles of justice that prefer accuracy and those that favor scope or depth usually corresponds, respectively, with rights-based deontological theories and consequentialist ethics.

EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY: POLICY AND MEASUREMENT PARADIGMS

Abstract Equality of opportunity is a widely accepted principle of distributive justice and it is the leading idea of most political platforms in several countries. According to this principle, a society might institute policies that secure an equal distribution of the means to reach a valuable outcome among its members. Once the set of opportunities have been equalized, which particular opportunity, the individual chooses from those open to her, is outside the scope of justice. Ex ante inequalities, and only those inequalities, should be eliminated or compensated for by public intervention. The recent literature on the opportunity egalitarianism often merges these questions introducing two different economic issues. On one side the design of a public policy intended to implement the equality of opportunity view and on the other side the problem of measuring the degree of opportunity inequality in a society. We describe the basic setting and assumptions of some different approaches derived by Roemer’s algorithm for public policy and then we discuss some theoretical and empirical studies to separate and test alternative paradigms on the measurement of inequality of opportunity. Accordingly, an extended critique on the causality issue on policies and measurements is taken into account.

Global migratory potential and the scope of justice

We live in an era of global migratory potential — a time when a vast number of people have the physical capacity to move relatively quickly and easily between states. In this article, I use this fact to motivate a powerful objection to ‘statism’, the view that the egalitarian principles of justice which apply to citizens have no application outside the boundaries of the state. I argue that, in a world characterized by global migratory potential, the supposed contrast between the normative standing of citizens and non-citizens on which the doctrine of statism depends is much harder to establish than proponents of the doctrine seem to realize. Focusing initially on the well-known justification for statism based on the notion of reciprocity between cooperators in a joint venture for mutual advantage, I argue that non-citizens play just as important a role as citizens in upholding schemes of cooperation, and that non-citizens should therefore be included in the scope of egalitarian justice along with citizens. I then go on to explain why the problem raised by the fact of migratory potential threatens to undermine not only the reciprocity-based conception, but all other conceptions of statism. The challenge for the proponent of statism is to show that the relationship in which each individual citizen stands with the state is not only a justice-grounding relationship, but also one in which no non-citizen stands with the state. The challenge has not been met so far, and I argue that it is unlikely to be met in the future.

Speaking up: A conceptual model of voice responses following the unfair treatment of others in non‐union settings

AbstractBridging the literature of procedural justice, social identification, and voice, we present a conceptual model of observers' voice responses to injustices perpetrated on coworkers. Based on social identity theory, we contend that similarity to the target of injustice influences observer identification with the target, as moderated by the observer's scope of justice, which then influences the observer's perceptions of injustice and decision to express voice. Additionally, we posit that the link between observers' perceptions of injustice and expressed voice is moderated by the observer's perceived opportunity to express voice. Finally, we propose that the decision to express voice individually or collectively depends on the justice climate along with the costs and benefits associated with each option. Theoretical and managerial implications are discussed. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

The Scope of Justice and Global Dark Oppression

According to recent associative accounts of the scope of principles of justice, one owes duties of robust distributive justice to all those, but only those, with whom one is linked in a political association. On the Coercion Account, you owe duties of robust distributive justice only to those people who are under the same coercive authority as you are. On the Cooperation Account, you owe such duties only to those with whom you are cooperating in a joint venture. These accounts are taken to deny that the principles of distributive justice are global in scope. This paper argues that these associative accounts in fact imply that justice is global in scope. I begin by showing that there exists a worldwide political system we may call “global Dark oppression,” a condition in which all people whom global society classes as black, brown, or red are systematically harmed and exploited by the current world order. If so, I argue, then there exists the kind of global political association which the Coercion and Cooperation Accounts claim is necessary for distributive justice to be global in scope. Global racial oppression thus guarantees that justice is global.

The Scope of Justice in a Globalizing World : On the concept of 'Representation' of Nancy Fraser

The Scope of Justice in a Globalizing World : On the concept of 'Representation' of Nancy Fraser

A Flood of Justice: The Scope of Justice in the Flood Narrative (Gen. 6:5–9:19)

AbstractThe scope of justice in the Hebrew Bible is often human-centred. Humankind is given pre-eminence, and God's responses are judged according to human values. However the flood story in Gen. 6:5–9:19 offers a very different view of justice. It locates justice within a complex web of relationships between God, humans, other life-forms and the earth itself. The creator-otherness of God permeates the story. The justice codified in the Noahic covenant takes into account the differing natures and resultant vulnerabilities inherent in the relationships between these differing participants. It is a justice that accepts the human condition, the human capacity for evil, violence and corruption, but seeks to limit its propensity to corrupt creation through regulation and by ceding to humans the responsibility for policing these regulations.

Cognitive Disabilities and the Scope of Contractualist Justice

Throughout his theory of justice, Rawls assumes persons are normal and fully cooperating members of society over a complete life, and so have requisite capacities for assuming that role (Political 21). He acknowledges there is question of what is owed to those who fail to meet this condition, either temporarily (from illness and accident) or permanently (Political 21). His answer is that he very much doubts whether it is possible to answer this question within scope of justice as fairness. Rawls suggests three alternative responses to problems on which justice as fairness may fail. One possible response is this: perhaps we simply lack ingenuity to see how extension may proceed (Political 21). Second, it's possible that the idea of political justice does not cover everything, nor should we expect it to. Giving this response would imply that treatment of people with cognitive disabilities is not a matter of justice, but rather a matter of charity or compassion. Third, the problem may indeed be one of political justice but justice as fairness is not correct in this case, however well it may do for other cases. How deep a fault this is must wait until case itself can be examined. This last response implies that Rawls's conception of justice as fairness is indeed intended to cover all cases, but turns out to need amendment as it pertains to certain cases.

Making the global information society good: A social justice perspective on the ethical dimensions of the global information society1

AbstractThis article discusses social justice as a moral norm that can be used to address the ethical challenges facing us in the global Information Society. The global Information Society is seen as a continuation of relationships which have been altered by the use of modern information and communication technologies (ICTs). Four interrelated characteristics of the global Information Society also are identified. After a brief overview of the main socioethical issues facing the global Information Society, the article discusses the application of social justice as a moral tool that has universal moral validity and which can be used to address these ethical challenges. It is illustrated that the scope of justice is no longer limited to domestic issues. Three core principles of justice are furthermore distinguished, and based on these three principles, seven categories of justice are introduced. It is illustrated how these categories of justice can be applied to address the main ethical challenges of the Information Society.

“Not So Much As Place to Lay Our Head...”: Moral Inclusion and Exclusion in the American Civil War Reconstruction

A war’s end can prompt societal change. This article examines inclusionary justice in the post-war period, when societies have the opportunity to change in ways that include formerly disadvantaged groups within the scope of justice. Using historical material on the Reconstruction after the American Civil War, this theory-generating article examines the post-war inclusionary trajectory for enslaved people who were emancipated as a result of the war. After briefly describing the Civil War, the article discusses four points along an inclusionary/exclusionary continuum of the Reconstruction: self-inclusion, instrumental inclusion, obstructed inclusion, and institutionalized exclusion. The article then looks at after-effects of the Reconstruction at two points in time: the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education U.S. Supreme Court decision and the hardships after Hurricane Katrina in 2006. The article concludes with lessons from the Reconstruction for a psychology of inclusionary justice, including the multidimensionality, difficulty, and urgency of changing the status quo, the importance of including missing voices, and the challenges of studying inclusionary change. It argues that moral inclusion needs to occur in political, legal, economic, and social spheres of society if it is to be sustained.

Disability and the Social Contract

In Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership (“Frontiers of Justice”), philosopher Martha Nussbaum demonstrates the power of her capabilities approach for political theory by proposing to bring three often-disregarded groups safely within the scope of justice. Like animals and economically underdeveloped nations, she contends, people with disabilities are excluded from traditional social contract theory. In its simplest (perhaps oversimplified) form, social contract theory requires recipients to reciprocate for social benefits received, for why would people freely enter into cooperative arrangements with one another if the scheme was not similarly advantageous for all?1 Specifically, why would productive people contract to cooperate with unproductive individuals whose inclusion in the cooperative scheme brings no additional resources to the common store? The implausibility of self-regarding productive people choosing nonproductive ones as cooperators propels the presumption that every party to the contract must have the ability to make real contributions to achieving mutual advantage for all the parties together (p 66). This is one of the many theoretical and practical commonplaces that Nussbaum challenges in her illuminating critique.