Moral Justice as “Closeness-And-Distance”: Lévinas – Derrida

Waiting for Justice: Benjamin and Derrida on Sovereignty and Immanence

WAITING BEFORE THE LAW IN KAFKA’S PARABLE “BEFORE THE LAW” WE SEE, quite famously, that the story’s protagonist (known only as “the man from the country”) is forced to wait before the gate of law for his whole life. The gatekeeper, whose only purpose seems to be to bar the man’s way, keeps him sitting on a stool just before the gate. As the man is dying from old age, he has this well-known exch...

Justice and the Moral Lexicon

Moral disagreement and procedural justice: Moral mandates as constraints to voice effects

Procedural voice is a widely used and effective means to reduce or eliminate conflict. Moral disagreements, however, are particularly inflammatory, divisive, and difficult to manage. The current article reports two studies that demonstrated the unique challenge that moral disagreements pose. Specifically, the studies tested the extent to which procedural voice affected justice judgements, group...

Vagueness as Closeness

In this paper I present and defend a definition of vagueness, and draw out some consequences of accepting this definition. §1 asks what we should properly expect of a definition of vagueness, and §2 reviews existing definitions. §3 explains a key background notion necessary to an understanding of the definition to be presented here. §4 presents this definition, and §5 explains its advantages. §...

Exposure to justice diminishes moral perception.

Evidence suggests that people have a lower threshold for the conscious awareness of moral words. Given the potential motivational relevance of moral concerns, the authors hypothesized and found that motivational relevance of moral stimuli enhanced the detection of moral words. People who saw a CrimeStoppers advertisement in which a majority (vs. minority) of wanted murderers had been brought to...