ABSTRACT
In Chapter 4, I attempted to explain respect for autonomy in terms of an ethics of care, and I propose now to do the same kind of thing with regard to social justice. I have made substantial efforts in this direction in previous work, but this will be the first time that I shall be incorporating considerations having to do with empathy into a theory, or view, of what justice involves. (I shall not have much to say about rights because a theory of rights can be given in a fairly unproblematic way once a theory of justice has been accepted.)
I think it is possible to understand the justice of laws, institutions, and social customs on analogy with the ethics of individual (acts and attitudes of) caring. The ethics of empathic caring evaluates the actions of individuals in terms of whether they express, exhibit, or reflect empathically caring motivation, or its opposite, on the part of individuals.1 But the laws, institutions, and customs of a given society are like the actions of that society, for they reflect or express the motives (and beliefs) of the social group (or sub-groups) in something like the way that individual actions reflect or express an agent’s motives (and beliefs), though in a more enduring manner that seems appropriate to the way societies typically outlast the individual agents in them. So an ethics of empathic caring can say that institutions and laws, as well as social customs and practices, are just if they reflect empathically caring motivation on the part of (enough of) those responsible for originating and maintaining them. But let me be a bit more specific.
