无辜受害事件对公正世界信念的威胁:观察者的角色偏倚

无辜受害者信息往往打破民众“好人有好报”的公正世界,而这种公正世界信念的威胁也因人而异。通过情绪Stroop效应验证这一心理现象,并探讨观察者与无辜受害者的群体归属以及观察者的不公正体验是否会影响公正世界信念威胁的程度。结果表明:(1)无论观察者是否与无辜受害者属于同一群体,或者观察者有无不公正体验,无辜受害者信息均会激活观察者的公正世界信念。(2)相比于外群体,当观察者与受害者属于同一群体类型(内群体)时,其公正世界信念的激活程度更强。(3)内群体观察者在有和无不公正体验的条件下,公正世界信念的威胁程度不存在显著差异。     

Life Satisfaction and Job‐Seeking Behavior of the Unemployed: The Effect of Individual Differences in Justice Sensitivity

This study examines the effect of justice sensitivity on the life satisfaction and job‐seeking behavior of unemployed individuals and considers the likelihood of experiencing long‐term unemployment. We focus on two facets of dispositional justice sensitivity that reflect individual differences in perception and reactions to perpetrating injustice against others (perpetrator sensitivity) or suffering from the injustice of others as an innocent victim (victim sensitivity). We hypothesised that the negative effect of unemployment on life satisfaction is stronger among individuals with higher levels of victim sensitivity and perpetrator sensitivity. The former are more likely to perceive themselves as victims of an unjust situation, such as fate or the employer's decisions, whereas the latter are more likely to perceive themselves as perpetrators against the rules of social justice. Using survey data from approximately 400 participants, we found that unemployed individuals were less satisfied with life than employed individuals and that this relationship was stronger for perpetrator‐sensitive individuals. Unemployed perpetrator‐sensitive individuals were more likely to engage in active job‐seeking behavior and faced a lower likelihood of long‐term unemployment. The results are discussed in terms of the importance of justice‐related personality aspects of unemployed individuals for their well‐being and labor market outcomes.     

How Collusion Perpetuates Racial Discrimination in Societies that Ostensibly Promote Equal Opportunity

It is shown here that injustices due to racial discrimination are best identified in light of the deleterious effects they have upon their victims, rather than the beliefs and attitudes of their perpetrators. For among participants who cooperate clandestinely to bring about racial injustice there may be broad disagreement about what it is they are doing collectively, and why; or they may disagree in principle about whether what they are doing is morally right. I employ the notion of ‘nomotropic’ behaviour to replace the oversimplified notion of ‘rule-following’ in order to explain how duplicity and hypocrisy fall shy of being regarded as irrational in social climates where implicit norms reinforce racial privileging while explicit norms denounce it. Further, examining the ‘collective utility’ of dogmatic beliefs and norms comprising part of the social architecture that covertly reinforces racial injustice (while ostensibly deriding it) may help to explain why it often seems to make so little difference whether members of an unfairly advantaged elite, whose collaborative behaviour perpetuates a social injustice, individually approve of doing so or not.     

自私行为的传递效应

自私的传递效应指遭遇他人自私对待的个体也自私地对待无辜他人的现象。在这个过程中, 示范性规范、心理权利起着中介作用, 个体的公正敏感性、道德认同, 以及情境中的道德凸显和匿名性起着调节作用。已有研究多关注个体如何惩罚与报复直接伤害自己的自私者, 较少关注自私行为的受害者如何对待无辜的第三方。未来研究可关注他人自私如何通过影响个体的认知, 如普遍信任和道德判断, 进而影响其对待无辜者的态度与行为, 并且澄清情绪及共情在其中的作用。     

Epistemic Privilege and Victims’ Duties to Resist their Oppression

Victims of injustice are prominent protagonists in efforts to resist injustice. I argue that they have a duty to do so. Extant accounts of victims’ duties primarily cast these duties as self‐regarding duties (say, of Kantian self‐respect) or duties based on collective identities and commitments. I provide an account of victims’ duties to resist injustice that is grounded in the duty to assist. I argue that victims are epistemically privileged with respect to injustice and are therefore uniquely positioned to assist fellow victims. Primarily, they discharge this duty through testimony: victims alert other actors to the need for assistance and initiate and coordinate resistance efforts. I briefly provide an account of oppression that ranges from persecution to structural injustice. Through the examples of torture and ‘manterrupting’, I illustrate the duty and its limits. I outline shortcomings in victims’ epistemic privilege and explore means by which these can be overcome. I respond to objections from demandingness and fairness, arguing that victims have an essential, albeit circumscribed, role to play in defeating injustice.     

The Unfair Burdens Argument Against Carbon Pricing

Carbon pricing is one of the most politically important approaches for the mitigation of climate change in the world today. Most political actors who are not committed to climate change denial favor carbon pricing, either as emissions trading or carbon taxation. In this article, I argue that carbon pricing should be considered unfair in most of its forms. I present a line of criticism called the Unfair Burdens Argument. It states that the most politically relevant ways to price carbon needlessly burden the less affluent more than the more affluent. This is unfair because, among other things, the more affluent have on average done more to create the problem of climate change in the first place. Principles for the fair distribution of burdens under climate change mitigation like the Polluter Pays Principle, which were thought to support carbon pricing, turn out to speak against it, when interpreted properly. Although the Unfair Burdens Argument on its own cannot show that carbon pricing is impermissible, it offers important clues for what a morally permissible form of climate change mitigation would look like.     

Basic‐Know And Super‐Know

Sometimes a proposition is ‘opaque’ to an agent: (s)he doesn't know it, but (s)he does know something about how coming to know it should affect his or her credence function. It is tempting to assume that a rational agent's credence function coheres in a certain way with his or her knowledge of these opaque propositions, and I call this the ‘Opaque Proposition Principle’. The principle is compelling but demonstrably false. I explain this incongruity by showing that the principle is ambiguous: the term ‘know’ as it appears in the principle can be interpreted in two different ways, as either basic‐know or super‐know. I use this distinction to construct a plausible version of the principle, and then to similarly construct plausible versions of the Reflection Principle and the Sure‐Thing Principle.     

Camus on Authenticity in Political Violence

Politically motivated attacks against civilians are typically evaluated by focusing on objective factors, such as the loss of innocent life, the justness of a rebel organization's political vision, and whether the attacks are successful in advancing that vision. Albert Camus' philosophy on rebellion provides an alternative approach that focuses on subject experience of the rebel. The rebel experiences a genuine moral dilemma created by the passionate desire to fight injustice and the feeling of universal solidarity that encompasses even those who the rebel believes it is necessary to kill. From this standpoint, any action the rebel takes is immoral. Camus thus makes authenticity the focus of his analysis. Authentic rebels continue to value solidarity, which creates a limit on how violence can be used in rebellion. Drawing from The Rebel and The Just Assassins, this paper develops several criteria for immoral but authentic acts of political violence, which are then applied to suicide bomb attacks directed against civilians.     

Is penal substitution unjust?

Penal substitution in a theological context is the doctrine that God inflicted upon Christ the suffering which we deserved as the punishment for our sins, as a result of which we no longer deserve punishment. Ever since the time of Faustus Socinus, the doctrine has faced formidable, and some would say insuperable, philosophical challenges. Critics of penal substitution frequently assert that God’s punishing Christ in our place would be an injustice on God’s part. For it is an axiom of retributive justice that it is unjust to punish an innocent person. But Christ was an innocent person. Since God is perfectly just, He cannot therefore have punished Christ. Virtually every premiss in this argument is challengeable. Not all penal substitution theories affirm that Christ was punished for our sins. The argument makes unwarranted assumptions about the ontological foundations of moral duty independent of God’s commands. It presupposes without warrant that God is by nature an unqualified negative retributivist. It overlooks the possibility that the prima facie demands of negative retributive justice might be overridden in Christ’s case by weightier moral considerations. And it takes it for granted that Christ was legally innocent, which is denied by the classic doctrine of imputation. It thus fails to show any injustice in God’s punishing Christ in our place.     

Why Historical Injustice Must be Taught in Schools

In societies that have failed to confront past injustice, the most common justifications for the inclusion of history education within the school curriculum invoke the idea that those who cannot learn from the past are doomed to repeat it; or they appeal to goals such as reconciliation, or to the importance of recognizing and morally redressing the harm done to victims. These justifications are all sound and important. However, they must be supplemented with a justification of a different kind, one that appeals to a different kind of value, namely that of personal and political autonomy. When historical injustice is left unaddressed in school, so this paper argues, all children and adolescents are wronged, including those who were not involved in, or were directly affected by, past injustice. This is not simply because as a result they run the risk of repeating, or of being the victims of, behavior that caused past violence; or because without history education the harm done to their predecessors is left unacknowledged. They are wronged because ignorance of past injustice curtails the full exercise of their autonomous agency. It does so by denying them access to information that is crucial for evaluating their values and commitments. History education in schools can avoid this scenario, promoting autonomy instead.     

What are Adaptive Preferences? Exclusion and Disability in the Capability Approach

It is a longstanding problem for theorists of justice that many victims of injustice seem to prefer mistreatment, and perpetuate their own oppression. One possible response is to simply ignore such preferences as unreliable ‘adaptive preferences’. Capability theorists have taken this approach, arguing that individuals should be entitled to certain capabilities regardless of their satisfaction without them. Although this initially seems plausible, worries have been raised that undermining the reliability of individuals' strongly‐held preferences impugns their rationality, and further excludes already marginalised groups. I argue that such criticisms trade on an ambiguity between two uses of the term ‘adaptive preference’. An adaptive preference is often assumed to be irrational, and an unreliable guide to its possessor's best interests. However, I suggest a preference may also be adaptive in the sense that it is an unreliable guide to our distributive entitlements, and that this does not require an assessment of individuals' rationality. I consider this distinction in relation to disability, arguing that this clarification allows us to justifiably ignore some disabled individuals' preferences, in the context of theorising about distributive justice, without disrespecting or undermining their rationality or culture.     

Scepticism about Beneficiary Pays: A Critique

Some moral theorists argue that being an innocent beneficiary of significant harms inflicted by others may be sufficient to ground special duties to address the hardships suffered by the victims, at least when it is impossible to extract compensation from those who perpetrated the harm. This idea has been applied to climate change in the form of the beneficiary‐pays principle. Other philosophers, however, are quite sceptical about beneficiary pays (both in general and in the particular case of human‐induced climate change). Our aim in this article is to examine their critiques. We conclude that, while they have made important points, the principle remains worthy of further development and exploration. Our purpose in engaging with these critiques is constructive — we aim to formulate beneficiary pays in ways that would give it a plausible role in allocating the cost of addressing human‐induced climate change, while acknowledging that some understandings of the principle would make it unsuitable for this purpose.     

Equating Innocent Threats and Bystanders

abstract Michael Otsuka claims that it is impermissible to kill innocent threats because doing so is morally equivalent to killing bystanders. I show that Otsuka's argument conflates killing as a means with treating a person herself as a means. The killing of a person can be a means only if that person is instrumental in the threat to Victim's life. A permission to kill a person as a means will not permit killing bystanders. I also defend a permission to kill innocent threats against Otsuka's Trolley Cases. Otsuka depicts a person tied to an oncoming trolley as a bystander. I argue that such characters are threats whom Victim can permissibly kill.     

Against Substitutive Harm

Frances Kamm's Principle of Secondary Permissibility (PSP) specifies a class of exceptions to the general rule not to kill as a means. The principle allows us to harm as a means some of those who would have been otherwise harmed as side effects. ‘For example, suppose it is impermissible to paralyze A's legs as a means to a greater good. It would still be permissible to do this as the alternative to permissibly killing A as a mere indirect side effect.’ I argue that, despite of its great appeal, PSP is incorrect; it is simply not true that the victims of substitutive harm are not worse off than they would otherwise permissibly have been. In fact, there is no moral difference between the purportedly substitutive harm licensed by PSP (and its extension) and the standard sort of harming as means repudiated by nonconsequentialists.     

Vertical individualism and injustice: The self‐restorative function of revenge

In the current paper, we examine the role of vertical individualism in determining revenge behavior following an injustice. Drawing on existing theory and research, we hypothesized that victims who are more vertically individualistic will be more likely than those who are less vertically individualistic to engage in revenge following the experience of injustice as a means of restoring self‐esteem. The results from three studies—employing different methodologies and operationalizations of revenge—support our reasoning. Moreover, two of the studies provide support for the proposed self‐esteem maintenance mechanism underlying the relation between vertical individualism and revenge. Although much research in psychology and organizational justice has demonstrated that the experience of injustice can threaten one's identity, our data are the first to demonstrate that responding to injustice can restore people's self‐esteem to homeostasis. The present studies thus demonstrate that in some instances revenge may have an intrapsychic benefit for the victim, which helps to explain why some people engage in revenge despite possible negative interpersonal consequences. We discuss implications of our findings for social and organizational justice theory and for potentially mitigating revenge reactions to injustice. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Do innocent victims threaten the belief in a just world? Evidence from a modified Stroop task

Two experiments tested whether innocent victims threaten observers' belief in a just world. In both experiments, participants viewed an innocent victim then performed a modified Stroop task in which they identified the color of several words presented for brief exposures (followed by a mask) on a computer screen. When the threat to justice beliefs was presumably highest, color-identification latencies were greater for justice-related words than for neutral words. In Experiment 2, under conditions of high threat, justice-related interference predicted participants' tendency to disassociate themselves from and derogate the victim. These findings suggest that innocent victims do threaten justice beliefs and responses to these victims may, at times, be attempts to reduce this threat. The methodology presented here may be applied to future investigations of defensive, counternormative processes reflecting people's concern with justice.     

Testimonial Injustice and Mindreading

Miranda Fricker maintains that testimonial responsibility is the proper corrective to testimonial injustice. She proposes a perceptual‐like “testimonial sensibility” to explain the transmission of knowledge through testimony. This sensibility is the means by which a hearer perceives an interlocutor's credibility level. When prejudice causes a hearer to inappropriately deflate the credibility attributed to a speaker, the sensibility may have functioned unreliably. Testimonial responsibility, she claims, will make the capacity reliable by reinflating credibility levels to their proper degree. I argue that testimonial sensitivity may be or involve “mindreading,” the cognitive capacity by which we predict human behavior and explain it in terms of mental states. Further, I claim that, if testimonial sensibility is or involves mindreading, and mindreading is a function of brain processes (as claimed by cognitive neuroscientists), testimonial injustice cannot be corrected by testimonial responsibility. This is because 1) it appears to rely on conscious awareness of prejudice, whereas much bias occurs implicitly, and 2) it works at the individual level, whereas testimonial injustice occurs both individually and socially. I argue that the remedy for testimonial injustice is, instead, engaging in social efforts that work below the level of consciousness.     

Injustice in the Spaces between Concepts

I argue that epistemic injustice manifests not only in the content of our concepts, but in the spaces between them. Others have shown that epistemic injustice arises in the form of “testimonial injustice,” where an agent is harmed because her credibility is undervalued, and “hermeneutical injustice,” where an agent is harmed because some community lacks the conceptual resources that would allow her to render her experience intelligible. I think that epistemic injustice also arises as a result of prejudiced and harmful defects in the inferential architecture of both scientific practice and everyday thinking. Drawing on lessons from the philosophy of science, I argue that the inferential architecture of our epistemic practices can be prejudiced and wrongful, leading to a variety of epistemic injustice that I am calling “inferential injustice.” This type of injustice is fully structural; it inheres in our epistemic practices themselves rather than as a direct result of an individual's action. For this reason, cases of inferential injustice are importantly different from extant cases of epistemic injustice and are especially hard to track. We need a better understanding of inferential injustice so that we can avoid and ameliorate cases such as the ones I present here.     

The forgiveness process in primary and secondary victims of violent and sexual offences

It is possible that the physical and mental health of crime victims might be improved by forgiving those who have offended against them. To date, no research has been undertaken to examine the processes that influence victims' forgiveness. The goal of this project was to examine the forgiveness process in primary and secondary victims of violent and sexual crimes. In Study 1, qualitative data were collected by interviewing 21 people who had been affected by sexual or other violent crime. Data analysis identified five themes that were common to both primary and secondary victims, namely benefit of forgiveness, self‐forgiveness, perspective taking, offender behaviour, and time. An empowerment theme was unique to primary victims, and a principal victim theme was unique to secondary victims. To further explore these qualitative findings, a quantitative survey of 60 primary and secondary victims was conducted. Results confirmed that primary victims are pragmatic forgivers who are internally focused and forgive because that will benefit their healing. Conversely, secondary victims did not think forgiveness benefited, or would impact on, their own or the primary victim's recovery process. Neither group saw forgiveness as a moral issue, nor thought that forgiveness should influence whether an offender should face court.