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.
The writing of this chapter was completed while the authors were summer participants at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.
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Karniol, R., Miller, D.T. (1981). Morality and the Development of Conceptions of Justice. In: Lerner, M.J., Lerner, S.C. (eds) The Justice Motive in Social Behavior. Critical Issues in Social Justice. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-0429-4_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-0429-4_5
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