Summary: Boltanski, Thevenot - On Justification, Chapter 1, Preface

Administrative Science Quarterly, 2008

2008

2020

This chapter moves beyond interpretation and understanding, discussed in the last chapter, to justification of beliefs. As against the older view of there being a uniform structure to justification across disciplines, I adopt a modified version of Michael Williams’ view that different disciplines have their own procedural autonomy. The modification consists in affirming procedural continuity (for obtaining evidence) as well as autonomy. This modification is prompted by the need to avoid relativism of truth. This modified version of contextualism is dubbed Pluralistic Realism, as against the naive metaphysical realism seen in Chap. 3. The key to maintaining diversity without alethic relativism is the NaC-Di-NoS principle (Natural-and-Cultural-are-Distinguishable-but-not-Separable). ‘Natural’ means that certain cognitive abilities (e.g., a class of our perceptual abilities) are innate (hence, universal) to human beings. Distinguishability of the natural and the cultural enables us to ...

Encyclopedia of Critical Psychology, 2014

Nowhere has the critical impulse “overshot its target” as widely as in relation to the concept and activity of justification (Latour, 2002). The truth of this proposition in psychology is evidenced in the ambiguity of language and concepts dealing with the truth of propositions generally: reasons are not always reasonable, but often “rationalizations”; moral justification might as easily be called “moralizing”; and what is “just” can always be countered as just one’s opinion. A great deal of psychological theory and research focuses on the construction and deconstruction of justifications, with much of this work documenting the ways in which justifications can be self-serving (Wolff & Moser, 2008; Gino & Ariely, 2012), group-serving (Sidanius & Pratto, 1999), or system-serving (Jost & Banaji, 1994; Shepherd & Kay, 2012; Day, Kay, Holmes, & Napier, 2011). The emancipatory potential of critical psychology’s contribution lies not only in critique of ego-justification and social dominance, but in championing the more empathic principles that ground authentic justification and the values of pluralism and inclusivity.

1990

The purpose of this essay is to reflect on the problem of moral justification and its relation to the idea of justice. It is argued that, as a predicate of moral judgments, the idea of justice involves two ethical requirements articulated among themselves: the first indicates the aspiration to guarantee a non-arbitrary meaning for the norms that we ought to obey; the second reflects an emphasis on the doubly consensual character and universalizability of these norms. Finally, it is concluded that the challenge of reciprocal consent, a condition for normative consensus, is linked to a constructive sense of morality, around which the notion of justice can assume an equally pedagogical value for moral agents.

The goal of this article is to rethink the relationship between the concepts of justification and wrongdoing, which play vital roles in the theory of criminal law. Reading George P. Fletcher's new book, The Grammar of Criminal Law, in the context of his earlier scholarship has led me to one major disagreement with Fletcher as well as with the traditional criminal law doctrine: for Fletcher and many others, wrongdoing and justification mutually exclude each other; for me, they do not. Consider a hypothetical: a group of people are captured by criminals. The criminals are about to kill everyone but then they have a change of heart and offer their victims a deal: if Jack rapes Jill, the criminals will let everyone go. If not, no one's life will be spared. Realizing that this is the only way to save several lives, including Jill's own, Jack reluctantly agrees. Jill, on the other hand, vehemently protests that she would rather die than be violated. When Jack attempts to overp...

Sovereign Justice, 2010

Social Science Research Network, 2011

By articulating the pragmatics of justification in cases of conflicts among basic rights, this paper endeavors to solve the tension between the seeming political vacuity of abstract moral universalism and the seeming parochialism of theories sensitive to cultural context. This solution emerges within a discourse-theoretic model of political judgment - what I name “critical deliberative judgment”. Its parameters are elaborated first in a reconstitution of Critical Theory (as a tradition of social philosophy) that focuses attention on the emancipatory, rather than the conciliatory dimensions of judgment. The model is further elaborated by way of replacing the reliance on ideal theory of justice with a pragmatist political epistemology. The latter accounts for the way specific experiences of injustice affect publics' identification of what counts as relevant issues in debates over conflicting rights. Finally, the model is completed with an account of the critical and emancipatory w...