Exposure to Violence and Attitudes Towards Transitional Justice

Transitional justice has emerged to address victims' needs as a means of restoring relations broken by violence. Yet we know little about victims' attitudes towards different transitional justice mechanisms. Why do some victims prioritize retributive justice while others favor other forms of dealing with the violent past? What determines victims' attitudes towards transitional justice policies? To address these questions, we offer a new theoretical framework that draws upon recent insights from the field of evolutionary psychology and links both war exposure and postwar environments to transitional justice preferences. We argue that both past experiences of wartime violence and present‐day social interdependence with perpetrators impact transitional justice preferences, but in divergent ways (resulting in greater support for retributive vs. restorative justice measures, respectively). To test our framework, we rely upon a 2013 representative survey of 1,007 respondents focusing on general population attitudes towards transitional justice in Bosnia two decades after the implementation of the Dayton Accords. Specifically, we examine the impact of displacement, return to prewar homes, loss of property, loss of a loved one, physical injury, imprisonment, and torture on attitudes towards transitional justice. On the whole, our findings confirm our two main hypotheses: Exposure to direct violence and losses is associated with more support for retributive justice measures, while greater present‐day interdependence with perpetrators is associated with more support for restorative justice measures. While acknowledging the legacy of wartime violence, we highlight the importance of the postwar context and institutional mechanisms that support victims in reconstructing their lives.     

Third-party punishment and symbolic intragroup status

Retributive justice theory has suggested two processes by which punishment is psychologically satisfying to victims of injustice: leveling the power imbalance caused by the transgression and revalidating social consensus over the importance of the rules, norms, and values violated by the offense. The current investigation proposes a third symbolic function that has not yet been identified as a psychological consequence of punishment: confirmation of the victim's membership status in the group (i.e., intragroup standing or respect). Three studies identified perceptions of intragroup membership status as following from third-party punishment, partly explaining the effect of punishment on a victim's group identification. Study 1 showed that, following the experience of an injustice, punishment prevented perceived membership status threats from resulting in victim disidentification. Study 2 showed that third-party desires to punish increased subsequent identification by symbolically communicating the ingroup's regard for the victim, even when the offender did not actually suffer the effects of third-party sanctions. Finally, Study 3 showed that punishment only implied membership status when the act of punishment was instigated by an ingroup authority and was thus identity-relevant. Taken together, these studies offer the first examination of membership status as a relevant concern underlying retributive justice.     

Book Reviews

Richard A. Swanson and Elwood F. Holton III, (eds), Human Resource Development Research Handbook. Linking Research and Practice Nathan Body and Howard Erlichman, Personal Psychology, The Science of Individuality Neil Anderson and Peter Herriot, International Handbook of Selection and Assessment     

论罗尔斯的政治义务理论

政治义务是政治哲学的核心问题。哈特首先用“相互限制原则”来解释政治义务,这一原则为罗尔斯所继承并加以修正。鉴于该原则存在的诸多问题,罗尔斯在《正义论》中削减了它在政治义务的道德证明中的作用,而诉诸正义的自然责任原则。这个原则仍然受到来自多方面的批评,许多罗尔斯的追随者对这些批评作了回应。罗尔斯从公平游戏原则到自然责任原则的转变反映了他对契约论不同的态度。     

正义的战争与战争的正义——关于战争伦理的反思

War can be defined as organized political violence among two or more nations. In accordance with the purpose, processes and results of war, the ethics of war generally comprises three aspects: right ethics, action ethics and duty ethics. The most important issue in ethics of war is “justice”. “Justice” and “injustice” as a conceptual pair do not prescribe the objective character of war but rather convey a subjective attitude and ethical position that have the potential to compel a populace to either support or oppose a war. Translated by Zuo Gaoshan and Xi Yunpeng from Lunlixue Yanjiu 伦理学研究 (Studies in Ethtics), 2005, (6): 43–48     

权力距离感对公平感与组织公民行为关系的调节作用研究

本文以188名企业员工及其同事为被试,运用问卷调查法和分层回归分析的统计方法考察了权力距离对公平感与组织公民行为之间关系的调节作用。结果发现:权力距离可以正向调节程序公平与同事评价OCB-I、OCB-G和OCB-O之间的关系,即权力距离感越强,则程序公平感与同事评价OCB-I、OCB-G和OCB-O之间的相关越强。     

经济正义:当代伦理学面临的重大课题

正义是一个历史范畴。人类对正义的追求经历了一个由个人正义到社会正义、由政治正义到经济正义的过程。随着经济关系成为支配社会发展的主要力量,经济发展的单向度价值取向的危害日益严重,社会不公正现象在经济领域中日益凸现,经济正义已成为当代社会正义理论中最重要、最具有社会意义的内容和形式。     

Shared Being,Old Promises,and the Just Necessity of Affirmative Action

Although the residues of official segregation are widespread, affirmative action continues to meet resistance in both official and everyday life, even in such recent Supreme Court decisions as Grutter v Bollinger (539 U.S. 306). This is due in part to a governing ontology that draws the line between individual and collective. But there are other possibilities for conceiving the social, and I offer one here in a theory of affirmative action that is developed through close examination of sharing and promising as elemental qualities of equitable communal life. The nature and value of these actions are demonstrated in narrative formulations of fairness as exemplified in triage and the situation at the end of slavery; of the difference between equality and equity and how justice depends on their conjunction; and finally of theorizing how these may come together in the permutable, opaque, yet resilient interdependence of person and community that represents most deeply the Greek idea of two in one, that is, of one two, not two ones. In these respects the paper is successful insofar as it discloses the kinds of reasoning that underlie both resistance and commitment to affirmative action.     

Global Economy,Justice and Sustainability

Although this paper attends to some extent to the question whether the global economy promotes or impedes either justice or sustainability, its main focus is on the relationship between justice and sustainability. Whilst sustainability itself as a normative goal is about sustaining inter alia justice, justice itself requires intergenerationally the sustaining of the conditions of a good life for all. At the heart of this is a conception of justice as realising the basic rights of all–in contrast to a more demanding distributive principle or a less demanding principle of not violating the liberty rights or other basic rights of others. Although Pogge’s analysis that the global economy causes harm by failing to realise basic rights is seen as a useful challenge to common libertarian assumptions, the acceptance of other positive correlative duties, following Shue, is advocated. Insofar as the global economy fails to realise basic justice, the question is ‘how far can it realistically be changed?’ and this is a function partly of the moral attitudes of individuals at large.