ABSTRACT
Let us start this chapter with some basic facts with which social-science research has provided us. Justice, in general, and desert, in particular, have been shown to be universal concerns across cultural groups. While these values manifest themselves in somewhat varying ways in different places, there remains – so social scientists aver – something that can be distilled from those differences and called a universal sense of (or for) justice: an orientation towards the just that can be associated with the human capacity for cognition and feeling. The latter is highly relevant here. Contemporary research in developmental and social psychology implicates emotions more and more in the experience and development of a sense of justice, with young children all over the world seeming to feel the sting of injustice from an early age. This is manifested in their capacity to experience emotions of compassion, indignation and so forth, and to demonstrate their feelings of fairness and unfairness in their relationships with others. Even the jungle boy studied by the eighteenth-century doctor Jean Itard is reported to have reacted with great rage when undeservedly treated, supporting the conclusion of psychologists that no cultural conventions, as expressed through particular socialization practices, are necessary for the emergence of the most primitive, desert-based, sense of justice. Thus Strawson’s ‘reactive attitudes’, many of which are desert-based, have been confirmed to be, if not ineluctable, then at least as a matter of fact ubiquitous in human life: original passions in Hume’s sense (see, for example, Simmons, 1981; Damon, 1988; Masters, 1992; Charlesworth, 1992; not to mention the abundant social-psychology research on the ‘belief in a just world’, surveyed in Section 4.2). Now, tracing the origin of a conception is not the same as providing a
moral justification for it. Nevertheless, there is good reason to think that an understanding of the development of justice concerns in children may shed some light on the origin, role, salience and, perhaps, ultimately the content of the full-blown notion of justice, thus helping us to evaluate it morally. This is why a hard look at developmental theories of justice is now in order. In this section, I first sketch some traditional accounts of moral
internalization, in general, and justice internalization, in particular, with a quick survey of the strengths and weaknesses of each account. I have already (in Section 1.2) registered my agreement with Simmons, who claims that the obvious starting point for the construction of philosophical perspectives on
justice should lie precisely in the ‘origin and development of social justice principles’ (1981, p. 41). We must, however, be mindful here of Carr’s welltaken point, of which I made use in my argumentation in Section 1.2, that the very notion of moral development is an inherently normative one. Picking up Carr’s general thread, my subsequent concern in the present section is to spell out the way in which normative concerns unavoidably enter into the design and interpretation of empirical research on children’s development of justice conceptions – with special emphasis on Damon’s well-known stage theory of development. As I will argue, normative considerations steer the design and interpretation of empirical research into the development of justice conceptions by providing assumptions both about what counts as a conception of justice in the first place (and what does not), and about what counts as a better (or worse) conception of justice. Only through mutual adjustments between different levels of ‘factual bruteness’, rather than between different levels of the purely descriptive and the purely evaluative, can we reach out to the perplexities of this morally loaded issue and arrive at a research project that can contribute both to a psychological and to a philosophical understanding of justice. Following my discussion of Damon, I turn to another eminent develop-
mental psychologist, Hoffman. I explore his theory of natural empathy as the fount of children’s morality. After outlining the theory and its empirical underpinnings, I offer a philosophical (conceptual and moral) critique of some of its aspects. While Hoffman’s theory offers valuable insights into the ways in which justice, like all moral concerns, relies on and relates to the child’s original capacity for empathy, it underestimates, I argue, the emotionality of justice itself as a pre-institutional concern and overestimates its status as an abstract principle. This discussion paves the way for the input on ‘just-world beliefs’ from social psychology that I examine in Section 4.2, and ultimately my moral defence of desert and desert-based emotions in Section 4.3.
