Online research in philosophy

The Book of Exodus describes the identity of justice and the law. Because elsewhere the gap between justice and the law is so wide -- in Christian theology when it sees the Pharisaic law as inhibiting the realization of justice; in philosophy where from Plato on, law is formal while is justice substantive; in political theory, which includes those who endorse "procedural justice" when they abandon substantive justice -- this radical biblical vision, wherein the law is justice is surely unique. This is not an understanding of the law as a series of prescriptions, the "yoke of the law" but the minimal requirement of respect for another's life and responsibility for those lacking protection: the widow, orphan, and poor. Emmanuel Levinas has noted the revolutional aspect of this revelation of justice, and defined the heirs of Abraham as those who have duties toward the other.

"Procedural Justice" offers a theory of procedural fairness for civil dispute resolution. The core idea behind the theory is the procedural legitimacy thesis: participation rights are essential for the legitimacy of adjudicatory procedures. The theory yields two principles of procedural justice: the accuracy principle and the participation principle. The two principles require a system of procedure to aim at accuracy and to afford reasonable rights of participation qualified by a practicability constraint. The Article begins in Part I, Introduction, with two observations. First, the function of procedure is to particularize general substantive norms so that they can guide action. Second, the hard problem of procedural justice corresponds to the following question: How can we regard ourselves as obligated by legitimate authority to comply with a judgment that we believe (or even know) to be in error with respect to the substantive merits? The theory of procedural justice is developed in several stages, beginning with some preliminary questions and problems. The first question - what is procedure? - is the most difficult and requires an extensive answer: Part II, Substance and Procedure, defines the subject of the inquiry by offering a new theory of the distinction between substance and procedure that acknowledges the entanglement of the action-guiding roles of substantive and procedural rules while preserving the distinction between two ideal types of rules. The key to the development of this account of the nature of procedure is a thought experiment, in which we imagine a world with the maximum possible acoustic separation between substance and procedure. Part III, The Foundations of Procedural Justice, lays out the premises of general jurisprudence that ground the theory and answers a series of objections to the notion that the search for a theory of procedural justice is a worthwhile enterprise. Sections II and III set the stage for the more difficult work of constructing a theory of procedural legitimacy. Part IV, Views of Procedural Justice, investigates the theories of procedural fairness found explicitly or implicitly in case law and commentary. After a preliminary inquiry that distinguishes procedural justice from other forms of justice, Part IV focuses on three models or theories. The first, the accuracy model, assumes that the aim of civil dispute resolution is correct application of the law to the facts. The second, the balancing model, assumes that the aim of civil procedure is to strike a fair balance between the costs and benefits of adjudication. The third, the participation model, assumes that the very idea of a correct outcome must be understood as a function of process that guarantees fair and equal participation. Part IV demonstrates that none of these models provides the basis for a fully adequate theory of procedural justice. In Part V, The Value of Participation, the lessons learned from analysis and critique of the

The main aim of this paper is to challenge the validity of the distinction between legal justice and social justice. It is argued that what we usually call legal justice is either an application of the more fundamental notion of social justice to legal rules and decisions or is not a matter of justice at all. In other words, the only correct uses of the notion of legal justice are derivative from the notion of social justice and, hence, the alleged conflicts between criteria of social and legal justice result from the confusion about the proper relationship between these two concepts. Two views about the social justice/legal justice dichotomy are of particular importance and will provide the focus for the argument: this dichotomy is sometimes identified with a classical distinction between distributive and commutative justice and sometimes with the distinction between substantive and procedural justice.

System justification theorists have proposed that people are motivated to view their political, economic, and social circumstances as desirable, necessary, and fair (e.g., Jost, Nosek & Banaji, 2004). Despite more than 15 years of system justification research, the meaning of fairness within this context has not been investigated directly. Over the past several decades three major criteria have been identified as contributing to people's perceptions of fairness: distributive justice, procedural justice, and one's own idiosyncratic set of personal values. Focusing on the last two, we reasoned that values are represented more abstractly than is information about procedural fairness, and that the relative weight of values versus procedures should increase at higher levels of mental construal. Whereas information about procedures is often seen as providing a basis for the acceptance of undesirable outcomes, judgments based on personal conceptions of right and wrong are considered to be independent from "establishment, convention, rules, or authority" (Skitka & Mullen, 2008, p. 531), and are therefore unlikely to be used in a motivated defense of the status quo. We therefore hypothesized that system justification would be most likely to occur in conditions where procedures are most salient (i.e., at low levels of construal). However, despite using manipulations of the system justification motive that have previously been successful, and working with issues similar to those used in previous work, we were unable to produce the typical system justification pattern of results. Possible reasons for this are discussed.

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.

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.

Democratic theorists often distinguish between two views of democratic procedures. ‘Outcomes theorists’ emphasize the instrumental nature of these procedures and argue that they are only valuable because they tend to produce good outcomes. In contrast, ‘proceduralists’ emphasize the intrinsic value of democratic procedures, for instance, on the grounds that they are fair. In this paper. I argue that we should reject pure versions of these two theories in favor of an understanding of the democratic ideal that recognizes a commitment to both intrinsically valuable democratic procedures and democratic outcomes. In instances in which there is a conflict between these two commitments, I suggest they must be balanced. This balancing approach offers a justification of judicial review on the grounds that it potentially limits outcomes that undermine democracy. But judicial review is not justifiable in any instance in which a bad democratic outcome results from democratic procedures. When the loss that would result from overturning a democratic procedure is greater than the gain to democracy that would result from ensuring against an undemocratic outcome; judicial review is not justifiable. Loss or gain to democracy is defined by the negative or positive impact of each action on the core democratic values of equality and autonomy, aspects of the democratic ideal. Even when judicial review is justified, the fact that it overturns intrinsically valuable procedures suggests that such review is never ideal from the standpoint of democracy.

The concept of organizational justice is important to understanding and predicting organizational behavior. A significant development in the research literature has been the separation of distributive and procedural justice. While much of the research has focused on negative outcomes, this research attempted to verify the presence of both forms of justice in the context of positive outcomes. Subjects completed an instrument designed to measure their perceptions of distributive and procedural justice. The subjects also reported their satisfaction and sense of fairness with their salary increases, their belief that the procedures to award the increases had been followed, and their level of information and agreement regarding the salary program. These measures, along with size of salary increase and gender were examined to determine their impact on the subjects' perceived level of justice. The data support the existence of the two distinct forms of justice, but suggest that procedural justice may, in turn, branch out into two aspects. One category involves being informed, and a second appears to deal with acceptance of procedures. A series of relationships are then considered. Significant gender effects were non-existent.

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.

This paper aims to outline the essential structural traits that a procedural theory of justice for the management of conflicts about values should display in order to combine open-endedness and cogency. To this purpose, it offers an investigation into the characteristics of procedural justice through a critical assessment of John Rawls‟s taxonomy of proceduralism, in terms of perfect, imperfect and pure procedural justice. Given the concessions the two former kinds of proceduralism make to substantive theories, and the potentially misleading characterisation Rawls gave of pure procedural theories of justice, it reformulates the latter category in terms of impure proceduralism. In this case, the theory is required not to pose substantive constraints on the qualities of just outcomes, but is, rather, expected to provide a trans-contextually applicable account of the qualities of just procedures on the basis of an independent criterion of justice.