scholarly journals Fairness, liberty and psychiatry

2009 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 46-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Ikkos

According to Beauchamp & Childress (2001) the fundamental principles of biomedical ethics include ‘justice'. But how do we approach ‘justice'? Justice may be thought of in relation to an individual or society. An individual may be just or unjust. Justice in society may be thought of as ‘retributive justice’ (fair punishment), ‘civil justice’ (fair recompense), ‘distributive justice’ (fair shares) or ‘social justice’ (a fair social contract for citizens of a society).

Author(s):  
Stanley Souza Marques ◽  
Marcelo Andrade Cattoni De Oliveira

The article takes up the criticisms directed by Axel Honneth to the basic structure of the dominant conceptions of justice, but merely to point out the general outlines of his alternative project of justice normative reconstruction. If John Rawls and Michael Walzer structure theories of distributive justice very consistently and in order to get to the autonomy protection (already taken so) in a more sophisticated way, that to be satisfied it transcends the (mere) obligation of not interfering in the realization of individual life projects, Honneth proposes the radicalization of justice's demands. It is because he pays his attention to the mutual expectation of consideration. This point would be the new texture of the social justice. In this sense, the principles of fair distribution leave the scene to make way for principles which guidelines are directed towards the society basic institutions involved in a new goal: to set up favourable contexts for the success of plural reciprocal relationships.


Author(s):  
John Tomasi

This chapter examines what it calls “social justicitis”—a strongly negative, even allergic, reaction to the ideal of social or distributive justice. Social justicitis is a malady from which many defenders of private economic liberty suffer. For libertarians, arguments on behalf of social justice may be as threatening as a bee sting is to some people. In the case of classical liberals, social justicitis arises as an adverse reaction to talk about social justice at the level of public policy. The chapter first considers the notion of distributional adequacy condition from the perspective of classical liberalism and libertarianism before discussing the arguments of classical liberals and libertarians regarding property and the poor. It also explores F. A. Hayek's critique of social justice and the implications of his theory of spontaneous order with respect to distributional ideals.


2021 ◽  
pp. 55-73
Author(s):  
Rhoda Olkin

For persons who are minorities, the impact of laws can be very directly experienced in day-to-day life. The myriad laws related to disability are scattered across many laws and throughout many agencies and can be hard to locate. Some of the laws, rules and regulations help, but some also hinder, the daily lives of the disabled. How the labyrinth of laws places a burden on people with disabilities is highlighted. There are four activities in this chapter. The first has students focus on laws that affect their everyday lives. In the second activity the concept of ‘separate but not equal’ is the focus. A third activity entails a comparison of social justice versus distributive justice as it applies to disability. In the fourth activity a game of ‘Eye Spy’ concentrates on the application of disability laws.


2002 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 529-544 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maureen Whitebrook

The place of compassion in political thought and practice is debatable. This debate can be clarified by stipulating ‘compassion’ as referring to the practice of acting on the feeling of ‘pity’; in addition, compassion might best be understood politically speaking as properly exercised towards vulnerability rather than suffering. Working with these understandings, I contrast Martha Nussbaum's account of the criteria for the exercise of compassion in modern democracies with the treatment of compassion in Toni Morrison's novels in order to suggest how compassion can be viewed politically. In respect of distributive justice and public policy, in both cases compassion might modify the strict application of principles in the light of knowledge of particulars, suggesting an enlarged role for discretion in the implementation of social justice. More generally, compassion's focus on particulars and the interpersonal draws attention to the importance of imagination and judgement. The latter returns a consideration of compassion to the question of the relationship of compassion to justice. In the political context, although strict criteria for compassion are inappropriate, principles of justice might work as modifying compassion (rather than vice-versa, as might be expected).


2020 ◽  
Vol 44 (8/9) ◽  
pp. 829-845
Author(s):  
Xinyi Bian

Purpose Employment mismatch is a significant problem in many countries. However, little conceptualization research has been conducted on employment mismatch from a social justice perspective. The purpose of this study is to shed light on social justice issues that have been obscured in the human resource development (HRD) literature through the lens of the distributive justice theory. Design/methodology/approach This study first reviews the literature to identify the gaps in employment mismatch research by reviewing three relevant bodies of literature: education mismatch, immigrant mismatch and disability mismatch. It then provides a new conceptualization of employment mismatch by examining employment mismatch through the lens of Rawls’ (1971) distributive justice theory. Findings The author proposed a framework of healthy employment relations using the constructs of social system design, moral guidance, education reform and individual development. Implications were proposed for research and practice. Originality/value The new framework of healthy employment approaches employment mismatch from four aspects embraced by the distributive justice theory. This model can assist HRD professionals and policymakers in responding to the employment mismatch of different populations.


2008 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 128-139
Author(s):  
Lucy Allais

1991 ◽  
Vol 25 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 302-331
Author(s):  
Wojciech Sadurski

Until very recently the dominant approach to the theory of punishment has been to discuss it in isolation from any general theory of the just distribution of benefits and burdens in a society. Almost without exception, the debate between the competing theories of punishment has run separately from the theory of distributive justice, as if the words “just” in “just punishment” and “just reward” belonged to two different species of “justice”. Perhaps the most important exception to this rule has been the position of radical utilitarians — i.e., act-utilitarians of J. J. C. Smart's genre, or wealth-maximization theorists of Richard Posner's ilk — who consciously treat the domains of economic distribution and of criminal punishment as two areas of application of one and the same set of over-arching principles. But, since neither for Smart nor for Posner is distributive justice (whether regarding economic goods, or penalties) a morally significant virtue, their theories really do not detract from the general trend that, in the literature on punishment, the conceptions of retributive and distributive justice are largely independent.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1470594X2110360
Author(s):  
David Miller

This article explores, comparatively and critically, Sidgwick’s and Rawls’s reasons for rejecting desert as a principle of distributive justice. Their ethical methods, though not identical, each require giving weight to common sense convictions about justice as well as higher-level principles. Both men, therefore, need to find a substitute for desert that captures some of its content – in Sidgwick’s case ‘quasi-desert’ takes the form of an incentive principle, and in Rawls’s case a principle of legitimate entitlement. However their reasons for rejecting desert are unclear, and at points appear to rest on contestable conceptual or metaphysical claims that their methodological commitments are meant to rule out. To clarify matters, the article distinguishes between three levels at which anti-desert arguments may operate: 1) Those purporting to reveal some fundamental defect in the idea of desert itself; 2) Those purporting to show that we cannot find a coherent basis for desert, at least for purposes of social justice; 3) Those purporting to show that it is impossible for social institutions to reward people according to their deserts, no matter which basis is chosen. At each level, the arguments put forward by Sidgwick and by Rawls are shown to be unsound.


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