Inhoud
Jost & Kay...............................................................................................................................................1
Rawls....................................................................................................................................................11
Stjerno..................................................................................................................................................16
Hornsey................................................................................................................................................23
Van Oorschot........................................................................................................................................28
Sachweh...............................................................................................................................................35
Jost & Kay
Social justice isn’t often clearly defied. Still disagreements even after centuries of debate,
Philosophical: social justice is a state of affairs (either actual or ideal) in which:
Benefits and burdens in society are dispersed in accordance with some allocation principle (or set
of principles)
Procedures, norms and rules that govern political and other forms of decision making preserve
the basic rights, liberties and entitlements of individuals and groups
Human beings (and perhaps other species) are treated with dignity and respect not only by
authorities but also by other relevant social actors, including fellow citizens.
These 3 aspects correspond to distributive, procedural and interactional justice.
Not all 3 aspects are needed to address in the theory, but it should address at least one of them.
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,Social justice is a property of social systems. Just social system is to be contrasted with those systems
that foster arbitrary or unnecessary suffering, exploitation, abuse, tyranny, oppression, prejudice and
discrimination.
Social psychology: establish the grounds of concern for any social psychology to establish the
grounds of concern for the welfare of other persons or groups, and how these are related to the
concern of individuals feel for their own welfare. pro-social behavior, altruism and justice motive.
Justice motive: the extent to which people are motivated to promote fair treatment of others and
not merely by considerations of self-interest.
But justice and self-interest are not always opposed. The sense of justice may originate in
humans and other primates in the self-protective desire to insure that they receive what they
“deserve”. When members of disadvantaged groups band together to push for civil rights or
other improvements in their quality of life, they are fighting on behalf of social justice as well as
personal and collective self-interest.
Purely justice motive = cases in which people are willing to risk or sacrifice their own welfare to
insure that others are treated fairly.
Rational Choice Theory: individuals should (and at least sometimes do) act on the basis of self-
interested preferences to maximize benefits and minimize costs. In forms of social exchange (as
economic markets) those preferences and behaviors that maximize individual welfare will
predominate.
Critiques say that underlying human behavior are considerably more complex than is suggested
by the rational choice model.
Evolutionary mechanisms are unlikely to privilege any traits that are not fundamentally selfish.
Several evolutionary theorists say that evolution favours selfish over prosocial (or altruistic)
behaviors. Any genes that fail to promote their own replication (at greater rate than they promote
replication of others’ genes) will not survive for long.
Advocates of universal egoism claim that everything we do, no matter how noble and beneficial to
others, is really directed toward the ultimate goal of self-benefit.
Advocated of altruism do not disagree with this, but they claim that there is more. That at least some
of us, to some degree, under some circumstances, are capable of a qualitatively different form of
motivation, motivation with an ultimate goal of benefiting someone else.
Empathy-altruism hypothesis: witnessing the distress of others instigates emphatic emotions
(compassion and tenderness) that facilitate perspective-taking and the setting of helping goals. Of
course, helping behavior brings certain rewards, but it can not be concluded that the helper was
motivated by those rewards.
Batson sought to determine whether the empathically aroused helper:
Benefits the other as an instrumental goal on the way to reaching some self-benefit as an
ultimate goal (egoism)
Benefits the other as an ultimate goal, with any resulting self-benefits being unintended
consequences (altruism)
Batson et al. have made a reasonably strong case for existence of altruistic motivation.
But, Cialdini et al. have argued that altruistic behavior, even when triggered by empathic emotions, is
never truly selfless. The circumstances giving rise to empathic concern also elicit other feelings, such
as sadness and perceptions of “oneness” or “self-other overlap”, and that these are capable of
generating seemingly selfless behaviors.
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, From the social justice standpoint, it may not mater greatly whether the motivation to help others
(and to sustain sacrifices in doing so) stems from purely altruistic desires or from moral emotions or
processes of social identification. The important point is that human beings do appear to be capable
of setting aside narrow self-interest to make the world a “better” (more just) place.
Forms of justice:
Distributive Justice
(Re)distributive fairness (considerations of “equity” and relative deprivation in the allocation of
resources).
Procedural justice
Addressing not only outcomes but the decision-making rules used to determine those outcomes
Interactional/informal/interpersonal justice
Incorporate concerns about informal as well as formal treatment by others in everyday life
Distributive justice
The issue of how to allocate scarce resources fairly and appropriately. Equality: maintaining the same
ratio of quantified good or burdens to quantified merit for all recipients. Aristoteles says that a just
distribution is one that is impartial in the sense of “treating equals as equals”. Today this will be
called principles of equity, proportionality or merit. But difficulties of justice theories based
exclusively on equity or proportionality principles is that decision makers disagree about which
“inputs” (or merits) should be utilized in determining proportional outcomes (or rewards).
Democrats: merit lies in being born a free person.
Oligarchs: merit lies in wealth or, for some of them, in noble descent.
Aristocrats: merit lies in excellence.
Political or ideological factors can influence one’s conception of social justice.
Unjust: what is unlawful and unequal
Just: what is equal and lawful
Reasonable person: the sort who decides on and does things of this kind, and who is not a stickler for
justice in the bad sense but rather tends to take a less strict view of things, even though he has the
law to back him up.
Courage, wisdom and self-control were also cardinal virtues along with justice.
Marx saw justice as an inherently bourgeois concern akin to noblesse oblige. He argued that
capitalism depends for its very existence on “surplus value” being created through the labor process.
The basic idea is that no worker is ever paid what his or her work is actually worth, otherwise there
would be no profit. But to survive, the worker has no real choice in a capitalist society. This situation
is a form of exploitation.
Utilitarianism is a consequentialist theory of justice. It assumes that the most just outcome or
procedure is whatever results in the greatest happiness of the greatest number. Support for the
welfare state, which redistributes wealth and other valued resources in such a way as to reduce the
misery of those who are worst off without extracting an equivalent amount of suffering from those
who are better off, is justified/justicized.
Philosophical utilitarianism is quite clearly a normative theory about how people ought to behave. In
many situations people are highly sensitive to the perceived consequences of an action when
evaluating its moral soundness.
Trolley problem: requires decision-makers to make hypothetical but morally troubling life-and-death
decisions about appropriate and inappropriate ways of minimizing harm to innocent bystanders.
Deontological approaches. Deontologists hold that determinations of right and wrong depend not
only on the consequences of human action but also on other considerations, including transcendent
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