Online research in philosophy

What is justice all about? What is the scope of the concept of justice? What issues can legitimately be evaluated in terms of justice? In her book Justice and the Politics of Difference, Iris Marion Young challenges the concept of justice as defined by John Rawls and used by many others in the philosophical debates that responded to Rawls’s, A Theory of Justice (1971). Is Young’s critique on the prevailing use of the concept of justice and contemporary theories of justice correct? Is her alternative understanding of the concept viable? In this paper I want to critically examine her views on the concept of justice and compare them with a close reading of John Rawls’s use of the concept of justice. The comparison of Young and Rawls will lead me to reconcile their views in terms of the central features of the concept of justice.

The nomological net for the construct of organizational justice was investigated. The estimated true score correlation between procedural and distributive justice (N = 4,696, K = 16) was 0.66. The patterns of correlations of both procedural and distributive justice with job satisfaction, OCB, commitment, and productivity were also meta-analytically estimated. Procedural justice was associated to a greater extent than distributive justice with organizational commitment, organizational citizenship behaviors and productivity. Distributive and procedural justice correlated similarly with job satisfaction. Partial correlations and variance reduction ratios suggested that relationships between distributive justice and work attitudes and behaviors were mostly mediated by procedural justice perceptions. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.

Building on organizational justice research, we extended the study of classroom justice to management education. In the first study, we identified the criteria that business students use to define distributive, procedural, and interactional fairness. In a second study, we found that management students' perceptions of both procedural and interactional fairness were significant and unique predictors of their evaluations of instructional effectiveness. However, procedural justice was the only significant predictor of overall evaluations of the course. Results of this study will aid management educators in implementing procedures and treatment that students perceive as fair and also to serve as ethical role models for managers of the future.

Liberal political theorists often argue that justice requires limits on policy outcomes, limits delineated by substantive rights. Distinct from this project is a body of literature dedicated to elaborating on the meaning of democracy in procedural terms. In this article, I offer an alternative to the traditional divide between procedural theories of democracy and substantive theories of justice; I call this the ‘value theory of democracy’. I argue that the democratic ideal is fundamentally about a core set of values (political autonomy, equality of interests, and reciprocity) with both procedural and substantive implications. Further, I contend that limits on policy outcomes can be newly understood as part of the democratic ideal. Key Words: democracy • rights • substantive • procedural • Habermas.

Liberal theories of justice typically claim that political institutions should be justifiable to those who live under them – whatever their values. The more such values diverge, the greater the challenge of justifiability. Diversity of this kind becomes especially pronounced when the institutions in question are supra-national. Focusing on the case of the European Union, this paper aims to address a basic question: what kinds of value should inform the justification of political institutions facing a plurality of value systems? One route to an answer is provided by John Rawls, who famously distinguishes between comprehensive and political values, and defends the exclusion of the former from the foundations of a political theory of justice. This paper questions the tenability of the Rawlsian solution, and draws attention to an alternative twofold conceptual distinction: that between minimal and non-minimal and between substantive and procedural values. Minimal values are meant to be as independent as possible of controversial conceptions of the good and views of the world, regardless of whether these are comprehensive or purely political. It will be argued that their endorsement may thus further specify the nature of what should be shared in order to justify political institutions in conditions of pluralism. In order to further refine the account of such basis of justification, two variants of minimalism will be presented according to whether they invest substantive or procedural values. Substantive values qualify the property of an outcome; procedural values qualify the property of a procedure. The latter part of the paper consists of a ‘face-off’ between minimal proceduralism and minimal substantivism, considering reasons in favour of the adoption of each. The result, we suggest, is a helpful reorientation of the political dimension of the value debates to which the multiplicity of values amid contemporary European horizons give rise.

This article aims to investigate the way in which a political theory of justice should respond to the endorsement of pluralism. After offering reasons in support of the necessity for such a theory to take pluralism seriously, an argument is put forward for its characterization in minimal and procedural terms. However, taking issue with the straightforward relationship of implication identified by a number of scholars between pluralism and procedural justice, this article contends that a direct relation can only be established between pluralism and the need to define a minimal theory of justice, i.e. a theory that assumes as little as possible in terms of values and views of the world. Its procedural formulation is seen, instead, as a consequence of the limited predictive power of theory facing the heterogeneous situations with which it is expected to deal.

This paper addresses the problem of the foundation of a procedural and minimalist approach to justice in terms of fair hearing. This approach may be summarised in the ‘principle of adversary argument’ (the idea that each side in a conflict should be heard). In particular, I intend to test whether this principle may provide the bases for a conception of justice applicable to conflicts of value in politics. More precisely, the considerations I shall offer aim to answer the following question: ‘How should fair hearing (and in particular fair hearing qua listening to the other side) be construed and justified in order to provide the bases for addressing value conflicts justly?’. To this end, I contend that previous efforts to argue for the principle of adversary argument, especially those offered by Stuart Hampshire, have failed to provide genuinely universal and normatively cogent foundations for it. However, I submit that such foundations are nonetheless derivable from a basic idea of procedural equality which all participants in conflicts of value could be thought to endorse.

Acts of civil disobedience and conscientious objection provide valuable indications of the congruence of political outcomes with citizens’ conceptions of justice and the good. As their primary concern is substantive, their logic seems extraneous to procedural approaches to justice. Accordingly, it has often been argued that these latter condemn citizens to a ‘deaf-and-blind’ acceptance of the outcomes of agreed procedures. A closer analysis of such acts of contestation shall reveal that although, for proceduralism, the outcomes of just procedures cannot be contested as unjust , they may be contested on the ground of values other than justice, such as someone’s religious/ethical allegiances. Proceduralism about justice will be thus shown to be consistent with the commitment to realising certain outcome-oriented values.

s distinction between perfect and imperfect procedural justice relies on the notion of a procedure that is guaranteed to lead to a certain independently specifiable result. Clarification of this notion shows that it makes the distinction between perfect and imperfect procedural justice unreal, in the following sense: whether, in a particular case, we have an instance of perfect or imperfect procedural justice depends only on how we choose to specify the procedure that is being followed. Key Words: procedural justice • John Rawls.

In this paper I focus on the discussion between Rawls and Habermas on procedural justice. I use Rawls's distinction between pure, perfect, and imperfect procedural justice to distinguish three possible readings of discourse ethics. Then I argue, against Habermas's own recent claims, that only an interpretation of discourse ethics as imperfect procedural justice can make compatible its professed cognitivism with its proceduralism. Thus discourse ethics cannot be understood as a purely procedural account of the notion of justice. Finally I draw the different consequences that follow from this reading. Key Words: discourse ethics • Jürgen Habermas • imperfect procedural justice • moral anti-realism • moral cognitivism • moral realism • perfect procedural justice • pure procedural justice • John Rawls.