Economic Justice

About: Economic Justice is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 41600 publications have been published within this topic receiving 661535 citations.

The Capability Approach

Abstract: text In its most general description, the capability approach is a flexible and multi-purpose normative framework, rather than a precise theory of well-being, freedom or justice. At its core are two normative claims: first, the claim that the freedom to achieve well-being is of primary moral importance, and second, that freedom to achieve well-being is to be understood in terms of people’s capabilities, that is, their real opportunities to do and be what they have reason to value. This framework can be used for a range of evaluative exercises, including most prominent the following: (1) the assessment of individual well-being; (2) the evaluation and assessment of social arrangements, including assessments of social and distributive justice; and (3) the design of policies and proposals about social change in society. In all these normative endeavors, the capability approach prioritizes (a selection of) peoples’ beings and doings and their opportunities to realize those beings and doings (such as their genuine opportunities to be educated, their ability to move around or to enjoy supportive social relationships). This stands in contrast to other accounts of well-being, which focus exclusively on subjective categories (such as happiness) or on the means to well-being (such as resources like income or wealth).

Modern Private Security: Its Growth and Implications

Abstract: On the North American continent, in Europe and elsewhere, the dramatic growth in private security in the past several decades has reshaped the structure and function of modern policing. The development of private security has been facilitated by fundamental shifts in the nature of property relations. These changes have encouraged the development of a preventative mode of policing consistent with the principles and hopes of nineteenth-century police reformers, but they also suggest that we are moving in the direction of a new disciplinary society and raise fundamental questions with respect to sovereignty, justice, and individual liberty now almost entirely unrecognised. In particular, the legal institutions regarding private property operate to enhance the potential threat to individual liberty posed by the development of modern private security.

The roots of modern justice: cognitive and neural foundations of social norms and their enforcement

Abstract: Among animals, Homo sapiens is unique in its capacity for widespread cooperation and prosocial behavior among large and genetically heterogeneous groups of individuals. This ultra-sociality figures largely in our success as a species. It is also an enduring evolutionary mystery. There is considerable support for the hypothesis that this facility is a function of our ability to establish, and enforce through sanctions, social norms. Third-party punishment of norm violations ("I punish you because you harmed him") seems especially crucial for the evolutionary stability of cooperation and is the cornerstone of modern systems of criminal justice. In this commentary, we outline some potential cognitive and neural processes that may underlie the ability to learn norms, to follow norms and to enforce norms through third-party punishment. We propose that such processes depend on several domain-general cognitive functions that have been repurposed, through evolution's thrift, to perform these roles.

Deserving and the Emergence of Forms of Justice1

Abstract: Publisher Summary This chapter discusses “deserving” and “emergence” of the theme of justice. The related themes of justice and deserving pervade the entire fabric of a society. The evidence for the importance of the theme of justice in a society can be strikingly juxtaposed against the equally vivid signs of institutionalized injustice and widespread indifference to the fate of innocent victims. Although various theorists have treated the definition in a conceptually more systematic way, “deserving” refers essentially to the relation between a person and his outcomes. A person deserves an outcome if he has met the appropriate “preconditions” for obtaining it. If a person does not get the outcome or gets something judged to be of less value, then he has not received all he deserved. Of course, the outcomes in question can be negative rather than positive in nature. The chapter approaches the more substantive issue of the extent to which people care about justice and the way these concerns affect their lives. It examines the question of why people care at all about justice and deserving. One possibility is suggested by a consideration of a developmental sequence, particularly the transition from living by the “pleasure” principle to living by the “reality” principle. The chapter highlights the development of the “personal contract”, altruism, and forms of justice.