Showing papers on "Economic Justice published in 1990"

Justice and the Politics of Difference

Abstract: This book challenges the prevailing philosophical reduction of social justice to distributive justice. It critically analyzes basic concepts underlying most theories of justice, including impartiality, formal equality, and the unitary moral subjectivity. Starting from claims of excluded groups about decision making, cultural expression, and division of labor, Iris Young defines concepts of domination and oppression to cover issues eluding the distributive model. Democratic theorists, according to Young do not adequately address the problem of an inclusive participatory framework. By assuming a homogeneous public, they fail to consider institutional arrangements for including people not culturally identified with white European male norms of reason and respectability. Young urges that normative theory and public policy should undermine group-based oppression by affirming rather than suppressing social group difference. Basing her vision of the good society on the differentiated, culturally plural network of contemporary urban life, she argues for a principle of group representation in democratic publics and for group-differentiated policies. "This is an innovative work, an important contribution to feminist theory and political thought, and one of the most impressive statements of the relationship between postmodernist critiques of universalism and concrete thinking.... Iris Young makes the most convincing case I know of for the emancipatory implications of postmodernism." --Seyla Benhabib, State University of New York at Stony Brook

The Calculus of Consent

Abstract: The Calculus of Consent Nancy Cruzan's personal tragedy threatens to become a national one. Embracing so many fundamental and symbolic aspects of life, the question of how she dies has understandably provoked profound and diverse responses. Various arguments have sought to convince the U.S. Supreme Court to preserve either the right to life or the right to liberty, as if they were mutually exclusive and the only two interests at stake. Yet the rhetoric of rights has proven confusing, demonstrating only that "[l]ogic relentlessly and inappropriately pursued to its end can as readily lead to destructive results as can muddled emotions." [1] At issue in Cruzan is not a choice between life and liberty, but a way of life consistent with a belief in ordered liberty. Cruzan poses a basic political problem that should occasion honest introspection and a search for a solution that harmonizes conflicting concerns most consistently with the Constitution's vision of the proper relationship between individuals and the state, and of consent's role in maintaining accountability. Understanding and preserving that vision takes more than mere philological and rhetorical skill; it requires embracing an experientially shaped perspective such as guided the Constitution's framers. The Constitutional Vision Where logic alone fails us, experience must be our guide, for as Justice Holmes noted, "the life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience." Reconciling the values, explicit and implied, that the Constitution requires us to protect involves bringing the wisdom gained from experiences the framers never had, such as that derived from the history of modern medicine, to the vision represented by the Constitution. The Constitution rests on the belief that citizens should both exercise self-determination and be free from unwarranted government interference in their personal lives. Central to the framers' vision was their experience of living under a government that denied individual freedoms concerning religious practice, expression, and conscience, and permitted excessive accruals of power, which the framers viewed as a form of tyranny. However difficult it may be to respect freedom when its results seem obnoxious, the framers concluded that the hardships of permitting freedom are fewer and less dangerous than the hardships of denying it, and that the dispersion of power prevents the excesses of tyranny. The Constitution's basic sense is that life is better if the state does not dictate attitudes or actions and plays a minimal role in defining individual values. [2] Preserving Life This constitutional vision of balance exposes major difficulties in the Missouri Cruzan opinion. In asserting an unchecked state interest in preserving life, even in cases that do not violate any criminal prohibition against murder or suicide, the Missouri Supreme Court undertakes to obstruct an act the state could not prosecute. Because Nancy Cruzan "may" live for thirty years and is not imminently dying for as long as she is artificially fed, she is not terminally ill under Missouri's statute. The court concludes that its interest in preserving life outweighs any identifiable interest in permitting her to die. Indeed, Missouri's "unqualified" interest in preserving life precludes any interest in the quality of life. Moreover, the court announces that only "clear and convincing" evidence will satisfy the obligation to respect self-determination, and then discounts entirely evidence the trial court found credible. To protect the infirm and the disabled, the court rejects as unreliable substituted judgement or best interests standards for decisionmaking. The crucial question of precisely what evidence would be "clear and convincing" is left unanswered, but the language used by the court, the trends indicated by the O'Connor case in New York, and legislation enacted in furtherance of the so-called "right-to-life" agenda, suggests that such an evidentiary standard will prove chimerical. …

Throwing like a girl and other essays in feminist philosophy

Abstract: Feminist social theory and female body experience are the twin themes of Iris Marion Young's twelve outstanding essays written over the past decade and brought together here. Her contributions to social theory raise critical questions about women and citizenship, the relations of capitalism and women's oppression, and the differences between a feminist theory that emphasizes women's difference and one that assumes a gender-neutral humanity. Loosely following a phenomenological method of description, Young's essays on female embodiment discuss female movement, pregnancy, clothing, and the breasted body.In an introduction that situates her work in the context of shifts in feminist theory and politics over the past decade, Young emphasizes the rootedness of her theorizing in a dedicated and seasoned political activism. Iris Marion Young, Associate Professor of Public and International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh, is author of "Justice and the Politics of Difference" and coeditor, with Jeffner Allen, of "The Thinking Muse: Feminism and Modern French Philosophy".

A Theory of Property

Abstract: 1. Property and justification Part I. Property Rights and Personal Rights: 2. Understanding property 3. Persons and their bodies 4. Body rights and the constitution Part II. From Individuals to Social Context: 5. Incorporation and projection 6. Control, privacy and individuality 7. Property and moral character 8. Alienation and society Part III. Justification and Distributive Equity: 9. Utility and efficiency 10. Justice and equality 11. Labor and desert 12. Conflict and resolution Part IV. Applications: 13. Business corporations 14. Gratuitous transfers 15. A moral and political theory of takings 16. Takings and the constitution Table of cases Index of names Index of subjects.

A feminist ethic of risk

Abstract: "Risk" is not just about specific actions fraught with danger. Sharon Welch's "ethic of risk" is captured beautifully by the Adrienne Rich poem "Natural Resources" which appears in her book: it means seeing all that needs to be repaired, acting without the illusion of certainty or victory, joining in solidarity and community with others, working without waiting for (or necessarily wanting) conventional political power, always moving forward in bravery and commitment. Welch wants us to ask ourselves If What improbable task, with which unpredictable results, shall we undertake today? If She urges us toward not a chain of singular unrelated actions, but an ethics of the long haul, one that inspires us to reject both despair and complacency. What is broken and needs fixing, she argues, is not just deep-seated societal problems, but Western constructions of what constitutes ethical responsibility and what counts as goodness. She argues against a (EuroAmerican middle-class) cynicism which, in the face of complexity, too often leads to a paralysis of will, sanctions doing nothing, all but ignores our obligation to work on structural, long-term issues, and serves to preserve gross societal inequities and problems. Welch offers her own definition of maturity: a recognition of the depth of evil in the world (and thus the need to act), and an acceptance that barriers to justice will not be removed by any one group or one generation (and thus the need to accept the world of limits). She calls for a "communicative ethics" of responsible action in which one is always engaged in collective reflection and action, including " mutually self-critical engagement" and accountability, in order to build the conditions for the pursuit of justice and peace,and sustain moral action and political activism. Her own reliance on teachings drawn from female African-American novelists embodies this very approach. She draws on "womanist" writings (a term preferred over "feminist" among many African-American women) "[nlot because [theirs] is the only 'true' voice, but because these voices disclose a knowledge of ethical responses and strategies [including "narratives of engaged goodness"] that is critical of my social location and [visions] of the possibilities for social change. " Better editing might have made this book less dense, or shorter and less ambitious. But its powerful rendering of a joyful and passionate path towards justice, even while acknowledging our limitations, is well worth the effort. Jews and Judaism as such are virtually invisible from this book, as are our multi-layered positions in relationship to the critique of '' Euro-American '' approaches and the consequent valuing of non-dominant voices. One Jewish critique of (and thus contribution to) Welch's approach: it's true that a theology of a transcendent God with absolute power can make human beings feel as though they are falling short and are powerless in the face of the work to be done. This presents a model of the good (Le. absolute power) that is often unattainable for those working for justice, while also reinforcing human pursuits of absolute power in the name of God. Yet the passionate Jewish commitment to a covenantal partnership with God, to our obligation to act in imitation of God's own ways-performing acts of caring, healing, and justice-can offer a "both/and" approach to reconciling a transcendent God-notion with the ethics of risk, and with new definitions of responsible action in the world.

Am I My Parents' Keeper?: An Essay on Justice Between the Young and the Old

Abstract: There is a growing perception in the United States that the old and the young are locked in a fierce competition for a critical but scarce resource - public funds for human services. Many feel that the old now receive a disproportionate share of available funds, to the detriment of the very young and of the poor in general. The rapidly increasing numbers of old people make it imperative to face a 'new' question of justice: 'How should social resources be distributed among the different age groups competing for them?' This book attempts to formulate a principled answer, rooted in a theory of justice, to this pressing question. Rather than talk about competition between age groups, we must realize that as we age all of us pass through a variety of institutions which affect our well-being at each stage of life. The task thus becomes the prudent allocation of public resources among the stages of our lives. Although the book is primarily concerned with issues surrounding the design of social institutions, it book will also be of interest to individuals on the subject of the nature of their elderly parents and other relatives. Readership: sociologists, policy-makers in social services; professionals and private individuals concerned with the care of the elderly.

Rawls: A Theory of Justice and Its Critics

Abstract: A new departure a contractarian theory a theory of justics a problem of interpretation the liberatarian critique the self-critique.

The Recent Work of Jurgen Habermas: Reason, Justice and Modernity.

Abstract: Acknowledgements List of abbreviations Introduction 1. Rationality, social theory and political philosophy 2. Action, rationality and normative discourse 3. Justice and the foundations of communicative ethics 4. Toward a minimal ethics and orientation for political theory 5. Communicative reason, modernity and contemporary capitalism 6. The two tasks of critical theory Notes Bibliography Index.

In the Eye of the Beholder: Tort Litigants' Evaluations of Their Experiences in the Civil Justice System

Abstract: Little is known about the reactions of tort litigants to traditional and alternative litigation procedures. To explore this issue, we interviewed litigants in personal injury cases in three state courts whose cases had been resolved by trial, court-annexed arbitration, judicial settlement conferences, or bilateral settlement. The litigants viewed the trial and arbitration procedures as fairer than bilateral settlement, apparently because they believed that trials and arbitration hearings gave their case more respectful treatment. They were less satisfied with the outcome of judicial settlement conferences than with the outcome of bilateral settlements, because judicial settlement conference outcomes were more likely to fall below their expectations. In general, procedural justice judgments and outcome satisfaction were little related to objective outcome, cost, or delay; instead the evaluations appeared to be determined largely by perceptions of whether the procedure met litigants' criteria for procedural fairness and expectations on outcomes and costs. Gender, income, and race did not have much effect on evaluations.

A passion for justice : emotions and the origins of the social contract

Abstract: This text argues that justice is a virtue which everyone shares - a function of personal character and not just of government or economic planning. It uses examples from Plato to Ivan Boesky, to document how we live and how we feel.

Partial Justice: Women, Prisons and Social Control

Abstract: Contemporary Research on crime, prisons, and social control has largely ignored women. Partial Justice, the only full-scale study of the origins and development of women's prisons in the United States, traces their evolution from the late eighteenth century to the present day. It shows that the character of penal treatment was involved in the very definition of womanhood for incarcerated women, a definition that varied by race and social class. Rafter traces the evolution of women's prisons, showing that it followed two markedly different models. Custodial institutions for women literally grew out of men's penitentiaries, starting from a separate room for women. Eventually women were housed in their own separate facilities-a development that ironically inaugurated a continuing history of inmate neglect. Then, later in the nineteenth century, women convicted of milder offenses, such as morals charges, were placed into a new kind of institution. The reformatory was a result of middle-class reform movements, and it attempted to rehabilitate to a degree unknown in men's prisons. Tracing regional and racial variations in these two branches of institutions over time, Rafter finds that the criminal justice system has historically meted out partial justice to female inmates. Women have benefited in neither case. Partial Justice draws in first-hand accounts, legislative documents, reports by investigatory commissions, and most importantly, the records of over 4,600 female prisoners taken from the original registers of five institutions. This second edition includes two new chapters that bring the story into the present day and discusses measures now being used to challenge the partial justice women have historically experienced.

Law and Society in Modern India

Abstract: Introduction Uses of law in Indian studies: The uses of law in Indian studies The emergence of the modern legal system: The displacement of traditional law in modern India The aborted restoration of indigenous law in India Panchayat justice: An Indian experiment in legal access - with Upendra Baxi Indian law as an indigenous conceptual system Legal conceptions of the social structure: Group membership and group preferences in India Changing legal conceptions of caste Pursuing equality in the land of hierarchy: Pursuing equality in the land of hierarchy: Assessment of India's policies of compensatory discrimination for historically disadvantaged groups Missed opportunitites: The use and non-use of law favourable to untouchables and other specially vulnerable groups Judges, Lawyers and social reform: Hinduism, secularism and the Indian judiciary Symbolic activism: Judicial encounter with the contours of India's compensatory discrimination policy New patterns of legal services in India

Voices of freedom : an oral history of the civil rights movement from the 1950s through the 1980s

Abstract: In this monumental volume, Henry Hampton and Steve Fayer draw upon nearly one thousand interviews with civil rights activists, politicians, reporters, Justice Department officials, and hundreds of ordinary people who took part in the struggle, weaving a fascinating narrative of the civil rights movement told by the people who lived it.

Deterring Moral Exclusion

Abstract: This paper focuses on the detection and deterrence of moral exclusion. From a variety of perspectives, different authors have demonstrated the progression of moral exclusion: from conflicts of interest, to group categorizations, moral justifications, unjust procedures, and finally, harmful outcomes. Dissent, divergent opinions, and a pluralistic perspective all help to combat moral exclusion by enlarging the scope of justice. However, dissent and diversity can narrow as well as widen the scope of justice, so it is important to identify conditions that support pluralism and the right to dissent. Research approaches are suggested that combine scientific investigation with expansion of the scope of social justice.

Choosing justice in experimental democracies with production

Abstract: We examine in a laboratory setting how direct participation in choosing a principle of distributive justice and a tax system impinges on subjects' attitudes and subsequent productivity when they participate in a task, produce income, and then experience losses or gains according to the tax system. Experience with a redistributive principle and its associated taxation system in a production environment does not detract from overall acceptance of the distributive principle, particularly for subjects who participate in choosing the principle. Participation in discussion, choice, and production increases subjects' convictions regarding their preferences. For these subjects (especially recipients of transfers) productivity rises significantly over the course of the experiments. No such effect is evident for subjects who do not participate in setting the regime under which they are to labor. The results' implications for questions of democratic participation and the stability of income support programs are drawn.

Law and the Sexes Explorations in Feminist Jurisprudence

Abstract: Feminist excavations blind justice the community of strangers lawyers and the legal paradox the man of law the sacrifial men keeping women in their place rethinking the law.

Social contract theory

Abstract: Human association and politics, Johannes Althusius war, peace and sovereignty, Thomas Hobbes the state as the outcome of two contracts, Samuel Pufendorf natural rights and civil society, John Locke the social contract and the general will, Jean-Jacques Rousseau social contract as an idea of reason, Immanuel Kant contractarian justice, John Rawls constitutional contract and continuing contract, James Buchanan the balance between rights individually held and rights collectively held, James Coleman justice as social choice, David Gauthier a contractarian view of respect for persons, B.J.Diggs.

The Tragedy of Political Theory: The Road Not Taken

Abstract: In this book J. Peter Euben argues that Greek tragedy was the context for classical political theory and that such theory read in terms of tragedy provides a ground for contemporary theorizing alert to the concerns of post-modernism, such as normalization, the dominance of humanism, and the status of theory. Euben shows how ancient Greek theater offered a place and occasion for reflection on the democratic culture it helped constitute, in part by confronting the audience with the otherwise unacknowledged principles of social exclusion that sustained its community. Euben makes his argument through a series of comparisons between three dramas (Aeschylus' Oresteia, Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannos, and Euripides' Bacchae) and three works of classical political theory (Thucydides' History and Plato's Apology of Socrates and Republic) on the issues of justice, identity, and corruption. He brings his discussion to a contemporary American setting in a concluding chapter on Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 in which the road from Argos to Athens, built to differentiate a human domain from the undefined outside, has become a Los Angeles freeway desecrating the land and its people in a predatory urban sprawl.

Democratic Justice: The Responsiveness of Prison Population Size to Public Policy Preferences

Abstract: How much influence do citizens have over government decisions? One way in which scholars have attempted to answer this question is by assessing the correspondence between public opinion and public ...

War, Justice and Public Order: England and France in the Later Middle Ages

Abstract: This is a study of two topics of central importance in late medieval history: the impact of war, and the control of disorder. Making war and making law were the twin goals of the state, and the author examines the effect of the evolution of royal government in England and France. Ranging broadly between 1000 and 1400, he focuses principally on the period c.1290 to c.1360, and compares developments in the two countries in four related areas: the economic and political costs of war; the development of royal justice; the crown's attempt to control private violence; and the relationship between public opinion and government action. He argues that as France suffered near breakdown under repeated English invasions, the authority of the crown became more acceptable to the internal warring factions; whereas the English monarchy, unable to meet the expectations for internal order which arose partly from its own ambitious claims to be 'keeper of the peace', had to devolve much of its judicial powers. In these linked problems of war, justice, and public order may lie the origins of English 'constitutionalism' and French 'absolutism'.

Toward a theory of cultural transparency: elements of a social discourse of the visible and the invisible

Abstract: Author(s): Wenger, Etienne | Abstract: This dissertation develops a number of analytical categories for investigating what people know about the world in which they live. It is an attempt to open up a universe of discourse about learning that does justice to the social character of human life. The argument of the dissertation is developed in the context of an ethnographic study of a claim processing center in a large insurance company.The basic argument is that knowledge does not exist by itself in the form of information, but that it is part of the practice of specific sociocultural communities, called here "communities of practice." Learning then is a matter of gaining a form of membership in these communities: this is achieved by a process of increasing participation, which is called here "legitimate peripheral participation." Learning thus is tantamount to becoming a certain kind of person.Visible objects such as artifacts, symbols, language, gestures, also belong to the practice of these communities. Therefore, seeing the cultural significance of these objects, something I call "cultural transparency," requires access to the practices to which they belong. This in turn requires membership in the relevant communities. The relation between artifacts and persons, which one may describe as understanding or not understanding, is therefore never a direct relation between them, but one that is mediated by a person's specific forms of membership in specific communities and by an object's being part of the social practices of some communities, which may or may not be the same. To the extent that these communities are different, such an object can be called a "boundary object" that mediates the articulation of these communities. This dissertation investigates the nature of one such object and analyzes both the relations that it can mediate and the forms of knowledge and senses of self that can result.The availability of an analytical discourse such as the one explored here is important because technological advances and the division of labor imply that we deal more and more with objects that do not primarily belong to our communities of practice. This is especially relevant to the design of computer systems.

Justice and the Māori: The Philosophy and Practice of Māori Claims in New Zealand since the 1970s

Abstract: This text records the debates among New Zealanders as to whether Maori should be compensated for past wrongs or treated differently from Pakeha because they are worse off in the land they came to first. It considers the claims of ethnicity and tribalism in a modern, liberal state, and examines justice in the distribution of authority and property in general. It is at once a history book, and a book on the philosophy of identity, sovereignty and justice.

Creating People's Justice: Street Committees and People's Courts in a South African City

Abstract: Ever since coming under colonial rule, Africans in South Africa have operated informal courts which the state courts have not recognized. Using fieldwork data, we contrast two such nonstate judicial structures in Cape Town. We describe the street committees, constituted by the older generation as a subsidiary form of local government coexisting uncomfortably alongside formal apartheid authorities. We then show the explosive consequences of the development from 1985 of youth-run people's courts, which attempted to redefine community values. We conclude with a discussion of our findings in the context of existing theoretical work on informal justice and draw some tentative conclusions on possible developments in a postapartheid era.

Utilitarianism and Distributive Justice: Jeremy Bentham and the Civil Law

Abstract: Psychological hedonism and the basis of motivation the principle of utility and the criterion of moral judgement security, expectation and liberty subsistence, abundance, and equality and the conditions of stability the security-providing principle the disappointment-preventing principle and substantive justice.

Justice, gender and international boundaries

Abstract: Discussions of international and of gender justice both legitimately demand that principles of justice abstract from differences between cases and that judgements of justice respond to differences between them. Abstraction and sensitivity to context are often treated as incompatible: abstraction is taken to endorse idealized models of individual and state; sensitivity to human differences is identified with relativism. Neither identification is convincing: abstract principles do not entail uniform treatment; responsiveness to difference does not hinge on relativism. These points are used to criticize discussions of international and gender justice by liberals, communitarians and feminists. An alternative account of justice is sketched, which combines abstract principles with consideration of human differences in the application of principles. The case of poor women in impoverished economies – a hard case both for gender and for international justice – illustrates how universal, abstract principles of justice may not only permit but mandate differentiated application.

Prison on Trial: A Critical Assessment

Abstract: Part 1 Prison - does it have a defence?: a system in growth a new stage in the use of prison? the purpose of punishment. Part 2 Rehabilitation: the origin of the word the origin of the ideology work school moral influence discipline rehabilitation is neutralized does prison have a defence in rehabilitation? Part 3 General prevention: general prevention as a paradigm general prevention as communication punishment and signification general prevention and morality does prison have a defence in general prevention? Part 4 Other theories of social defence: other theories of individual prevention incapacitation deterrence does prison have a defence in incapacitation and individual deterrence? Part 5 Justice: the circle of theories the modern theory of justice does justice stand alone? the limits of justice does prison have a defence in justice? Part 6 The future of imprisonment: the ideology of prison what is to be done? legislation policy preparation closing - the near and the distant future.