Compensatory justice to the victim of a crime and judicial practices in India: An empirical study

The Constitution of India guarantees that justice shall be delivered to all. The duty to ensure that justice delivery is accessible to all is entrusted to state bodies. The legislature is expected to ensure that the legal framework is there, the executive is expected to ensure that all infrastructural needs of the justice delivery system are in place, and the judiciary is expected to ensure that justice is delivered in their area. This paper deals with the issue of delivery of victim justice, with a special focus on compensatory mechanisms laid down under the Code of Criminal Procedure 1973. The Code empowers the courts to award compensation to the victim of a crime to ensure his/her rehabilitation. In light of the observations made by the Supreme Court of India that the trial court judges do not exercise their discretionary power under the relevant statutory provisions to award compensation to the victims of a crime, this paper explores the extent of such failure and the reasons behind it.

Deterrence of Wrongdoing in Ancient Law

Ancient laws addressed all types of wrongdoing with a single set of remedies that over time pursued a changing mix of retaliatory, punitive, and compensatory objectives. In this paper, we consider the historical transition from retaliatory to punitive justice, and the subsequent transition from punitive to compensatory justice. This paper shows how the optimal level of enforcement varies under the three corrective regimes. Crimes that create a larger net social loss require lower levels of enforcement under retaliatory regimes. The optimal level of enforcement is instead independent of the degree of inefficiency of the crime when punitive and compensatory remedies are utilized. The paper provides several historical illustrations and sheds light on some of the legal paradoxes of ancient law.

Race

This article examines the tendency of racial differences to support violations of distributive justice. It is thus a discussion in non-ideal theory and avoids discussion of ideal theory. It begins by showing that races are social constructions. Social constructions are sets of mainly false beliefs, and racial differences support violations of distributive justice because of the nature of these beliefs. The races as social constructions are generated by ideologies that are developed for some political purpose such as a defense of black slavery or the forced deportation of black people from America. Affirmative action is defended on the basis of a backward looking appeal to compensatory justice. The argument is that it can be designed so as to expunge the false beliefs that constitute the social constructions of race, and educate the public about racism.

Assessing Cognitive Ethical Logics for Commercial Emotions

The usefulness of cognitive ethical logic in understanding the ethicality of emotional labour at commercial establishments cannot be undermined, and drawing on this perspective, the present study explores the derived moral logics for commercialized emotions especially in the context of call centres in two distinct subsets of professionals: potential working professionals and working professionals with experience. A sample of 129 respondents has been used for collecting data through open-ended questions and vignettes, which were designed to extract the perception of ethicality for emotional labour. The content of the responses were analysed by using cues from the grounded theory framework. Results indicate that both the respondent subgroups present equally strong consideration of emotional labour as unethical and not- unethical (rather than ethical). Threatened employee dignity emerges as the most important logic for considering emotional labour as unethical, while for the same to be considered not-unethical, the role of job description and compensatory justice gain significance. The results of the study have been discussed with the help of various frameworks of business ethics.

Political and legal antecedents of affirmative action: a comparative framework

Much of the literature on affirmative action is normative. Further, in scholarship that takes an empirical approach to examine this topic, the object of inquiry is typically the ramifications of such provisions – most notably the extent to which they foster social transformation. Yet, we know surprisingly little about the antecedents of affirmative action. This work examines what variables systematically predict affirmative action. We focus on the policy feedback literature and compensatory justice frameworks to examine the effects of democracy, modernisation and globalisation on affirmative action programmes. Time-series cross-sectional analyses of data for hundreds of groups from all over the globe for the period 1985–2003 confirm our hypotheses. This is the first work to examine affirmative action programmes in a large-N framework of such scale. We find that such programmes systematically correlate with democracy, modernisation and globalisation.

Have You Benefitted from Carbon Emissions? You May Be a “Morally Objectionable Free Rider”

Much of the climate ethics discussion centers on considerations of compensatory justice and historical accountability. However, little attention is given to supporting and defending the Beneficiary Pays Principle as a guide for policymaking. This principle states that those who have benefitted from an instance of harm have an obligation to compensate those who have been harmed. Thus, this principle implies that those benefitted by industrialization and carbon emission owe compensation to those who have been harmed by climate change. Beneficiary Pays is commonly juxtaposed with Polluter Pays Principle and the Ability to Pay Principle in the relevant literature. Beneficiary Pays withstands objections that raise suspicion for the latter two.