Justice Research Articles

Socioeconomic status self‐deception as a way to perpetuate classist societies

AbstractSocioeconomic status self‐deception refers to the motivated tendency to perceive oneself as having a higher subjective status than would correspond to objective conditions. This can be a powerful mechanism to legitimize the social order. We proposed that when people perceive the surrounding social environment to be classist, people tend to self‐deceive themselves by overestimating their socioeconomic status. This mechanism, in turn, would lead to justify the system to a higher extent and show less support for redistribution, and reduce relative deprivation and status anxiety. These hypotheses were tested across four pre‐registered studies on different high‐quality samples, different operationalization of the variables in our model, and both cross‐sectional and longitudinal observations. On the one hand, the results do not provide evidence of a link between perceiving a classist climate and socioeconomic status self‐deception. On the other hand, socioeconomic status self‐deception was confirmed to predict higher system justification, and lower support for redistribution, status anxiety and relative deprivation. The construct and operationalization of socioeconomic status self‐deception proposed in this research could help reconcile opposing predictions by system justification theory and social dominance theory, and understand why individuals low on socioeconomic status would oppose policies which could benefit them.

Mobilizing Critical Occupational Therapy Praxis to Promote Structural Justice, Equity, and Rights[Formula: see text

Societal structures and systems compel occupational therapists, at times, to behave in ways that perpetuate injustices. Justice theorists have described how Global North social structures have created the conditions for oppression of some groups while enabling additional groups to have unearned privileges. Mobilizing critical occupational therapy praxis is an essential response. This lecture addresses three questions: why should occupational therapists integrate structural justice, equity, and rights into their everyday practices?; what gives occupational therapy the potential to be a structural justice-, equity-, and rights-oriented profession?; and, how can occupational therapy mobilize critical praxis that will promote structural justice, equity, and rights? Occupational therapy's embeddedness in structures of injustice and therapists' obligations to integrate justice, equity, and rights into their everyday practices are increasingly evident. A focus on occupational participation, growing critical consciousness, socially transformative practices, and capacity for collective action position occupational therapy to be a structural justice-oriented profession. Critical reflexivity and reflection; justice-, equity-, and rights-based lenses; and acts of resistance and disobedience to oppressive systems can help mobilize critical praxis. Occupational therapists have individual and collective opportunities for exercising the moral imagination and moral courage to mobilize critical occupational therapy praxis.

Сергей Александрович Корф: развитие теории административной юстиции в межреволюционный период

The article examines the legal views of the prominent imperial administrator Baron Sergei Alexandrovich Korf. Baron became one of the first lawyers in Russia who examined the institution of administrative justice in a comprehensive manner and touched upon its historical development in foreign countries and Russia. The main attention of S.A. Korf devoted his time to studying the formation of the domestic theory of administrative justice, while simultaneously presenting his vision of the prospects for its implementation.

Unveiling the impact of school organizational justice on students’ professional commitment through academic stress mediation

Accurately understanding the critical elements influencing college students’ professional commitment is both an urgent practical requirement and a critical theoretical proposition in today’s intensely competitive job market. In order to provide new light on career development in the context of higher education, this study intends to investigate the complex interactions among college students between perceived organizational justice, academic stress, and professional commitment. Using descriptive statistics, correlation analysis, regression analysis, and structural equation modeling, we carried out a thorough investigation of H University’s full-time undergraduate students in Central China in order to thoroughly examine our hypothesis. The results show that students’ professional commitment is much lower when they view organizational justice to be lacking, and that there is a partial mediating role for academic stress in this relationship. Interestingly, organizational justice has a positive correlation with professional commitment and a negative correlation with academic stress. These findings provide educators and policymakers with insightful information, indicating that, in an increasingly competitive labor market, professional commitment is largely dependent on students’ ability to manage their academic stress and develop a sense of organizational justice. This study adds a new understanding of career development in higher education settings by merging professional commitment research with organizational justice theory. It also has significant implications for educational practices and career support measures.

Reconstructing AI Ethics Principles: Rawlsian Ethics of Artificial Intelligence

The popularisation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies has sparked discussion about their ethical implications. This development has forced governmental organisations, NGOs, and private companies to react and draft ethics guidelines for future development of ethical AI systems. Whereas many ethics guidelines address values familiar to ethicists, they seem to lack in ethical justifications. Furthermore, most tend to neglect the impact of AI on democracy, governance, and public deliberation. Existing research suggest, however, that AI can threaten key elements of western democracies that are ethically relevant. In this paper, Rawls’s theory of justice is applied to draft a set of guidelines for organisations and policy-makers to guide AI development towards a more ethical direction. The goal is to contribute to the broadening of the discussion on AI ethics by exploring the possibility of constructing AI ethics guidelines that are philosophically justified and take a broader perspective of societal justice. The paper discusses how Rawls’s theory of justice as fairness and its key concepts relate to the ongoing developments in AI ethics and gives a proposition of how principles that offer a foundation for operationalising AI ethics in practice could look like if aligned with Rawls’s theory of justice as fairness.

Separating McDowell’s two Myths of the Given - or on how to best explain the conceptuality of the space of reasons

In his book, John McDowell on Worldly Subjectivity, Tony Cheng argues that recent changes to McDowell’s theory of perceptual justification should lead him to accept that experiences possess non-conceptual content. In this paper, I take issue with Cheng’s conclusion. Instead, I argue that McDowell should adopt Travis’s position, where experiences aren’t taken to possess content at all. I argue that we can distinguish two separate Myths of the Given in McDowell’s writings. While McDowell often seamlessly moves from one to the other, I argue that it is difficult to see how he can justify this due to his recent alterations to his position. I argue that if we reject one Myth and retain the other, then McDowell can both hold on to a version of his view that the space of reasons is the space of the conceptual, all the while he accepts Travis’s arguments to the effect that experiences are devoid of content. Finally, I consider some arguments McDowell might present against accepting Travis’s position. While these objections do not convince me, what is notable about them is that, if they are sound, then they will equally count against Cheng’s intermediary position where non-conceptual contents are ascribed to experiences. Hence, I conclude that there are no grounds on which McDowell can reasonably endorse that experiences possess non-conceptual contents. Either he should stick to his conceptualism, or he should follow Travis and reject that experiences possess contents at all.

Assessing social equity of federal disaster aid distribution: A nationwide analysis.

In this study, we conduct the first comprehensive, nationwide assessment of social equity performance of multiple federal post- and pre-disaster assistance programs that differ in targeted recipients, project types, forms of aid, and funding requirements. We draw on the social equity and distributive justice theory to develop and test a set of hypotheses on the influence of program design and specificity on their aid distributional patterns and equity performance. The analysis uses panel data of about 3000 US counties to examine the relationship between a county's receipt of federal assistance and its recent disaster damage, socioeconomic, demographic, political, local government, and geographic characteristics in a two-stage random effects Tobit model. Expectedly, we find that post-disaster grants are largely driven by recent disaster damage, while damage is simultaneously influenced by local socioeconomic conditions. For all disaster programs, disproportionately more federal aid is allocated to populous counties. For programs geared toward state and local governments and targeting community recovery and mitigation, more aid is received by counties with better socioeconomic conditions. Conversely, for programs targeting individual relief and recovery, more aid is given to counties with lower incomes and greater social vulnerability. Results also indicate that counties located in high-risk regions receive greater outlays. These findings shed light on the varying degrees of social equity of federal disaster assistance programs tied to their cost-share requirement, funding caps, and inherent complexity of application procedures.

IMPLEMENTATION OF ONLINE DISPUTE RESOLUTION AND MARKETPLACE LIABILITY BASED ON THE PRINCIPLE OF INTERMEDIARY LIABILITY

The rapid growth of online transactions aligns with the increasing potential for disputes between consumers and businesses. The problem is the need for national regulations governing ODR, although some marketplaces have implemented internal dispute resolution systems. This research uses John Rawls' theory of distributive justice to analyze marketplace liability in online dispute resolution, focusing on the principle of intermediary liability. The research method involves a literature review and case analysis on several platforms such as Tokopedia, Shopee, AliExpress, and eBay. The results show that although some marketplaces have developed efficient ODR systems, there are still challenges related to transparency, security, and fairness. Marketplaces are expected to create a more comprehensive and equitable system, considering equal access for consumers.

Varieties of Consequentialism and Deontology in Theories of Tort Law

AbstractAn important contribution of Gregory Keating’s Reasonableness and Risk is to mount objections to law and economics whilst articulating an alternative deontological vision of tort law to that offered by corrective justice theorists. In this paper I offer two reservations about Keating’s account. One is that some forms of consequentialism can accommodate at least some aspects of his deontological theory, so we must be careful to distinguish between claims that strike at the heart of consequentialism and those that are only a problem for wealth maximisation. The second is that there are yet other varieties of deontology besides Kantianism and Keating’s alternative to it, and while I accept some of Keating’s claims, I think we should reject others. I will make the case for each of these reservations via discussion of three core features of Keating’s account: the harm/benefit asymmetry, the commitment to objective rather than subjective valuation, and his justification of strict liability.

A Kantian Justification of Fair Shares: Climate Ethics and Imperfect Duties

ABSTRACT The debate surrounding individual climate duties is divided between collectivists and unilateralists. The fair shares argument is the most influential unilateralist position. In this paper, I demonstrate how a Kantian approach could solve three problems the fair share argument faces. Firstly, the Kantian focus on an agent’s will avoids skepticism regarding the causal connections between individual actions and climate effects. Secondly, a Kantian argument for the imperfect duty to minimally restrict our emissions to an equal share justifies egalitarian fair shares. Thirdly, a Kantian ethical approach has direct political implications, taking away concerns about a distracting focus on individual efforts.

Are ‘coercive’ language policies fair?

AbstractThis paper provides a normative justification regarding the fairness of ‘coercively’ protecting minority languages in mixed societies where the minority group already knows the majority language. To do so, it adopts first a theory‐testing approach and examines, by using the Catalan case, the validity of the arguments presented in Morales‐Gálvez's (2017) ‘protectionist’ theory of linguistic justice. In this vein, it argues that some of the ideas this author uses to defend the ‘coercive’ protection of minority languages still work when the minority group is bilingual. Yet, there are others that appear to be problematic. As such, this paper then unfolds using a theory‐building approach and reframes these concepts with the objective of proposing complementary arguments. This article concludes that ‘coercive’ policies to protect the language of a bilingualised minority group are fair and necessary if they aim to accomplish active reciprocal bilingualism and hence ensure equal rights for all speakers.

Sustainable Sufficientarianism: Combining ‘Enough for all’ with Eco-Sufficiency

ABSTRACT Sufficientarianism is a theory of social justice that determines individual entitlements by setting a threshold of what is enough for a decent life. Sufficientarianism therefore seems to be a suitable ally for theories of climate justice, because it restricts claims of justice to a minimum. Furthermore, the notion of sufficiency has been theorized in ecological discourse, so there is pertinent conceptual overlap between the two perspectives. In this paper, I aim to combine sufficientarianism with eco-sufficiency. I will use a framework of needs to highlight different normative urgencies involved in practices that involve carbon emissions. However, as I will argue, the normative urgency of needs might cause problems for restricting emissions to levels that are compatible with planetary limits. In brief, the very aim of achieving sufficientarian justice might clash with the aim of eco-sufficiency. Sufficientarians should therefore critically engage with needs satisfiers as well, which are the means provided to satisfy needs. This step in my argument will be achieved through complementing sufficientarianism with an element of comparative justice, that is, interpersonal and diachronic considerations that help to determine the comparative urgency of claims. The overarching aim of sustainable sufficientarianism is to provide enough for everyone to live a decent life over time.

Enhancing Social Sustainability in Malaysian Supply Chains: Integrating Occupational Safety and Health for Resilient and Ethical Business Practices

This conceptual paper examines the insufficient integration of Occupational Safety and Health into Malaysian supply chains' social sustainability frameworks, despite its recognized impact on worker well-being and economic performance. While Malaysia has advanced in sustainability overall, incorporating OSH into broader social responsibility strategies remains underdeveloped. This paper argues that protecting worker well-being is essential for sustainable supply chains, directly contributing to social sustainability and economic performance. The study examines the ethical, legal, and business justifications for prioritizing OSH in supply chain management. It draws upon international human rights declarations, treaties, and conventions, including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and the ILO's Occupational Safety and Health Convention, to underscore the fundamental right to a safe and healthy work environment. This model developed through analysis of existing literature and policy frameworks, aims to guide a more comprehensive approach to OSH management within Malaysian supply chains. By analyzing these frameworks, the paper highlights the need for a comprehensive approach that aligns OSH with international standards and sustainable development goals. Ultimately, it advocates for a more resilient and equitable supply chain framework in Malaysia, where worker well-being is central to sustainable business practices.

Compliance to building thermal envelope insulation requirements based on theory of planned behavior (TPB) and procedural justice theory (PJT)

The construction industry plays a crucial role in achieving sustainable development, particularly in the context of energy conservation. addressing the building's optimized energy efficiency is essential, as it accounts for a significant portion of global energy consumption. While many countries have implemented policies related to building energy conservation, the lack of compliance with relevant regulations remains a challenge. However, voluntary self-regulated compliance can be encouraged through flexible approaches that leverage normative influence and equitable governance attributes within the regulatory system. This study evaluates the building contractors' intention to comply with the Building Thermal Envelope Insulation Requirements (BTE-IR), a critical energy conservation measure for buildings. An integrative model combining the Procedural Justice Theory (PJT) and the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) was developed to quantitatively investigate individual and social factors influencing compliance with BTE-IR. The study analyzed a sample of 214 Iranian building contractors using Partial Least Squares Structural Equations Modeling (PLS-SEM). The core findings revealed that subjective norms (β = 0.330, p < 0.01) and perceived behavioral control (β = 0.337, p < 0.01) significantly influence intention to comply with BTE-IR. Additionally, the study explored the moderating effects of job satisfaction, job commitment, years of experience, project experience and marital status on the relationships between variables in the research model. These findings can inform construction industry policymakers in developing optimized strategies for self-regulated compliance with BTE-IR and legitimizing the regulatory system for enforcing sustainable practices.

The Theory of Fairness with Integrity in Indonesia’s Electoral Justice System

This paper describes the concept of a fairness theory of justice with integrity applied in elections in Indonesia, drawing on the transformation of John Rawls' fairness theory. This theory is employed to examine various components of the electoral legal framework, focusing on the technical implementation of elections and the resolution of electoral disputes to achieve electoral justice in Indonesia. The research utilizes normative legal methodology, characterized by dogmatic legal analysis and theoretical-rational reasoning, employing a logical-deductive approach. It constructs the facts of electoral justice through an extensive review of legal literature and relevant data sources concerning the electoral process in Indonesia. The study addresses electoral practices as instruments of popular sovereignty, highlighting dissatisfaction among stakeholders regarding the election process. The theoretical variables associated with fairness with integrity are critically analyzed for their applicability in fostering electoral justice in Indonesia, emphasizing that a fundamental aim of electoral law enforcement is to ensure the realization of electoral justice.

How Green Space Justice in urban built-up areas affects public mental health: a moderated chain mediation model.

Green and blue spaces, as crucial components of urban ecosystems, significantly impact the physical and mental health of residents. However, the mechanisms through which Green/Blue Space Justice influence residents' health remain unclear. This study aims to explore the impact of green spaces on public psychological responses, physical activity, and mental health from a justice perspective, and to examine the moderating role of blue spaces in this relationship. The research was conducted in selected communities within the Chang-Zhu-Tan urban agglomeration in Hunan Province, China. A total of 801 valid questionnaires were collected through field visits and online surveys. The study uses an improved Gaussian-based two-step floating catchment area (2SFCA) method to assess green space accessibility. Data were analyzed using structural equation modeling (SEM) and moderation effect analysis to reveal the relationships between variables. The findings indicate that Green Space Justice has a significant positive impact on psychological responses, physical activity, and mental health; psychological responses and physical activity play crucial mediating roles between Green Space Justice and mental health; and Green Space Justice significantly affects mental health through a chain mediation path involving psychological responses and physical activity. Moreover, Blue Space Justice significantly moderates the impact of Green Space Justice on psychological responses and physical activity, but does not have a significant direct impact on mental health. This study enriches the theory of Green Space Justice by revealing the mechanisms through which it influences mental health via psychological responses and physical activity. It provides a scientific basis for the development of healthy cities. Additionally, it recommends that urban planning should prioritize the equitable distribution and high accessibility of both green and blue spaces to comprehensively enhance residents' physical and mental well-being. Policymakers should consider prioritizing the accessibility of high-quality green spaces for vulnerable communities during urban renewal and expansion processes to reduce social health inequalities and promote broader public health outcomes.

EU CIVIL PROCEDURE AFTER THE LISBON TREATY

With the Lisbon Treaty, a new page was opened in the development of EU civil procedure. This is so because тhe Lisbon Treaty has introduced Article 81 (ex-Article 65 EC) as a separate Chapter 3 of Title V on an Area of Freedom, Security, and Justice. With this, civil justice cooperation has gained an autonomous character and become distinct sub-area of the EU policy on Freedom, Security, and Justice.1 More importantly, the approximation of Member States’ civil procedural rules, provided for in Article 81 of the Lisbon Treaty, has gained a central role in the establishment and proper functioning of this Area and the EU in general. Precisely because of this, the subject of analysis of this paper is the new trend in the development of the civil procedure of the EU after the Lisbon Treaty, the advantages that this trend offers versus the old regime in EU and the future directions of development of the civil procedural law of the EU.

Community Benefit and Tax-Exemption Levels at Non-Profit Hospitals Across U.S. States.

To assess the association between state policies and sociodemographic characteristics and state mean fair share spending at non-profit hospitals. Fair share spending is a hospital's charity care and community investment less the estimated value of their tax-exempt status. Hospitals with non-profit status in the United States are exempt from paying taxes. In return, they are expected to provide community benefits by subsidizing medical care for those who cannot pay and investing in the health and social needs of their community. We used a multivariable linear regression model to determine the association of state-level sociodemographics and policies with state-level mean fair share spending in 2019. Fair share spending data was obtained from the Lown Institute. We found no association between the percentage of people living in poverty, in rural areas, or U.S. region and fair share spending. Similarly, there was no association found for state minimum community benefit and reporting requirements. The state percentage of racial/ethnic minorities was associated with higher mean fair share spending [+$1.48 million for every 10% increase (95% CI: 0.01 to 2.96 million)]. Medicaid expansion status was associated with a 6.9-million-dollar decrease (95% CI: -10.4 to -3.3 million). State-level community benefit policies have been ineffective at raising community benefit spending to levels comparable to the value of non-profit hospital tax-exempt status.

Local Income Inequality and the Value of Corporate Tax Responsibility

ABSTRACT Corporate tax responsibility, or the obligation of companies to pay their “fair share” of taxes, is increasingly perceived as a component of firms’ social responsibility. Considering tax payments through the redistributive function, we examine how the association between corporate tax responsibility and firm value varies based on the presence of a salient social issue—local income inequality. Firms headquartered in areas of average income inequality have a negative relation between effective tax rate (ETR) and firm value, consistent with traditional economic theory and prior research. However, as local income inequality rises above average, the relation between ETR and firm value becomes more favorable (i.e., less negative). We interpret these findings as evidence that the relation depends on the salience of tax payments as a social issue. Further, the results are substantiated by firms whose socially responsible tax payments are consistent with their reputation as good corporate citizens. Data Availability: Data are available from the public sources cited in the text. JEL Classifications: D22; H23; H25; H32.

Explaining the theory of social and spatial justice in the Islamic city

Explaining the theory of social and spatial justice in the Islamic city