Morality and the Development of Conceptions of Justice

  • Rachel Karniol
  • Dale T. Miller
Chapter
Part of the Critical Issues in Social Justice book series (CISJ)

Abstract

Social philosophers from Aristotle to Rawls have argued that justice is the primary value underlying all morality. Nevertheless, our understanding of how the concern with justice guides human behavior is far from complete. The explication of this relationship is made especially difficult because it is not easy to define justice. In fact, it often appears that justice is only definable in contrast with injustice. When we speak of a just act, we generally mean that the act has remedied or prevented an unjustice. From this perspective, the pursuit of justice can best be defined as the active process of remedying or preventing what would arouse the sense of injustice (Cahn, 1949). In this chapter, we attempt to describe how the sense of injustice is aroused and how the pursuit of justice becomes a moral value.

Keywords

Moral Judgment Procedural Justice Distributive Justice Physical Pain Physical Harm 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Copyright information

© Springer Science+Business Media New York 1981

Authors and Affiliations

  • Rachel Karniol
    • 1
  • Dale T. Miller
    • 2
  1. 1.Department of PsychologyTel Aviv UniversityRamat AvivIsrael
  2. 2.Department of PsychologyUniversity of British ColumbiaVancouverCanada

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