Rising from the ordinary: Virtue, the justice motif and moral change

Justice understood as a practical principle and virtue has remained an understudied subject in the anthropology of morality. Moral anthropology has explored the moral or ethical as a space of freedom and creativity, whereas justice has often been associated with rule-following or even the law. In contrast, my paper explores justice as a virtue whose social dynamic can initiate moral change in ordinary life. This virtue, as I understand it, comprises not only a disposition to conform to established norms but also a capacity to reformulate these in the pursuit of social justice. My ethnography of Chinese peasant lawyers’ moral agency suggests that their understanding of justice as an essentially social, rule-governed and outcome-oriented virtue can grant new insights into the dynamics of moral innovation that arise in ordinary life. The peasant lawyers of rural northern China pursue moral change through combining moral reasoning about justice with principled action for justice and the provision of benefits for victims of injustice. It is the concern with the consequences of principled action that distinguishes justice as a social virtue from the other virtues, and the justice motif from alternative drivers of social change.