ABSTRACT
Normative concerns are ubiquitous in communications research, but what exactly are normative concepts and theories and how do they differ from empirical ones? Furthermore, what is justice, and how does it relate to communications? This chapter introduces normativity (which is concerned with how things ought to be), and contrasts it with the empirical (which is concerned with how things actually are). It then examines justice, which concerns a particular set of normative questions about the organization of our wider social relations. Broadly, there are procedural and substantive conceptions of justice, even though communications sit more naturally with the former because public reason, deliberation, and other critical features of procedural justice are intrinsically communicative.
