ABSTRACT
For a social species, having a psychological repertoire replete with emotions sparked by human interchange, it is relationships not rights that people really live for. The justice of rights is a justice of entitlements. It is a conception of justice in which personal entitlements are the fundamental moral objects in view and their enforcement is crucial. Rights are lines in the sand, legal boundaries that must not be crossed, with punishments for transgressors. The more recent history of humankind can be seen as the history of a passage from the justice of right relationships towards a regulatory justice of rights and norms. Nowhere is the modern regime of rights more clear, and the legal lines in the sand more painfully enforced with inflictions, than in the area of criminal justice. Because right relationships are largely the product of procedural knowledge about how to treat others, justice of right relationships requires that people have and apply that knowledge.
