Justice and Desert-Based Emotions

Kristján Kristjánsson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351924498
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The clear message proposed in this book is that justice matters for morality and desert matters for justice - and that emotions matter for desert, justice and morality. Moreover, and no less importantly, justice education needs to take all those facts into consideration. Kristján Kristjánsson's new book falls on the cutting edge of the latest developments in justice discourse, both in philosophy and in the social sciences. Written from a philosophical perspective, it gives an accessible but penetrating exploration of various interlocking and interdisciplinary themes relating to justice. Kristjánsson justifies the necessary interplay between philosophers and social scientists dealing with justice, probes the role of desert in justice and explains the rising interest in the emotionality of justice. He then analyses the main desert-based emotions, connects his discussion to recent trends in developmental and social psychology, offers a moral justification of desert and desert-based emotions, and concludes by applying all those ideas in a close study of how justice and desert should be handled in moral education at school. Kristjánsson deftly weaves together insights from disparate academic areas relevant for justice, in general, and desert, in particular. This is an engaging, eye-opening and provocative book that should excite anyone interested in justice discourse and help generate debate in different areas related to justice: philosophical, psychological and educational.

Chapter 1
Introduction

1.1 Mapping the Field

‘I experienced profound joy when I heard about the dot-com bankruptcy’; ‘I felt so happy about Anne’s promotion; she really deserved a break after all her tough luck’; ‘I was genuinely sorry for John when he was diagnosed with lung cancer although I suppose he had it coming to him after all his crazy smoking’; ‘I feel kind of guilty about my recent stroke of luck; my poor brother would really have deserved some of it’; ‘Don’t you feel, like me, that Bill has had more than his fair share of good fortune recently?’; ‘Why does my brother always get a bigger birthday cake than me? I know he’s three years older than me, but it still isn’t fair’; ‘I cannot honestly complain about my recent set-backs, I probably deserved them the way I behaved’; ‘I admit that Beth is talented, but I hate the way she seems to think this gives her a moral claim to an extra share of the good things in life’; ‘I know it is wrong, but when my colleague went to have her teeth bleached this morning and they turned a putrid yellow colour, boy, did I get a kick out of that!’

From an early age, our emotions take up a substantial part of everyday conversation. If we consider the judgements passed at the dinner table or while doing the washing-up – at the times when the tongue speaks what the heart thinks – many of those will, I believe, turn out to be of the kind exemplified above: that is, having to do with the good or bad fortunes, just or unjust, deserved or undeserved, of ourselves and of our relatives, friends, colleagues and neighbours, and how we react emotionally to our lot and theirs. Where do such emotions stem from? What beliefs and desires do they incorporate? What is their relationship to ideals of justice, and where does the notion of desert fit into the picture? Are desert-based emotions morally justifiable under some circumstances and if so, how should we cultivate them in moral education? The present book is precisely about such emotions: their genesis, nature, moral standing and schooling. The key terms to highlight here, as we initiate our discussion, are ‘emotions’, ‘justice’, ‘desert’ and ‘schooling’, and this is the place for a few prefatory remarks about each of those in turn.

There has been a burgeoning of interest in the emotions in recent years. After decades, even centuries, of relative neglect, empirical and evaluative research on the emotions has gradually been coming into its own as an established discipline – or, perhaps more aptly put, as a series of established sub-disciplines – in the fields of psychology, philosophy, sociology and education. The phoenix-like rise of academic interest in the emotions, in general, and in their moral implications, in particular, is surely long overdue, given the fact, amply illustrated through history in countless intriguing novels and other works of art, that most of what is interesting about human life – at least from a moral point of view – is played out in the field of the emotions (cf. de Sousa, 1987, p. 17). Some of the academic interest has also percolated through to the public. The fundamental message of the prevailing cognitive theories of late, that emotions are in principle educable and regulatable, has, indeed, struck such a chord with the ordinary person that academic buzzwords such as ‘emotional intelligence’ have suddenly become topics of spirited discussion in the workplace and at the dinner table. I will assume here, from the beginning, that in order to make sense of the good life, the life worth living, we need to implicate emotions in our moral explorations, and to consider, for example, the moral basis on which the emotionally driven everyday statements of my opening paragraph above, about deserved and undeserved fortunes, could rest.

There has never been a dearth of interest in justice in academic circles. Since the ancient Greeks, questions of justice have riveted the attention of almost every major philosopher. It may be asked how many strings justice has to its bow. While a fair diversity of scholarly opinion continues to be generated on that question, the days are gone when the idea of desert as a possible string in the justice-bow could be dismissed with a few peremptory remarks. Indeed, as critical attention has shifted away from the Rawlsian (1973) and Nozickean (1971) accounts of institutional justice, which dominated the debate in the 1970s and 1980s, towards a Feinbergian (see originally Feinberg, 1970) discursive tradition that accommodates desert-based pre-institutional concerns as one consideration among others in a pluralistic account of justice, the notion of desert or deservingness – one systematically overlooked and maligned since Enlightenment times – has undergone a revival. This revival is not only evident among moral and political philosophers (see, for example, Olsaretti, 2003a), but also among social scientists (see, for example, Ross and Miller, 2002). Some have focused on what people mean by ‘desert’ (for example, Feather, 1999), others on what they ought to mean in order to advance the debate (for example, Sher, 1987), and yet others on children’s alleged acquisition of a ‘natural’ belief in a world where people get what they deserve (see various articles in Ross and Miller, 2002); lurking in the background have been deeper normative questions about what role, if any, desert should play in a sound moral outlook (see, for example, Miller, 1999).

In contrast to the desert-ignoring theories of a quarter of a century ago, the pluralistic philosophical justice theories of late tend to be either desert-sensitive – that is, they accept pre-institutional desert as a salient, if somewhat easily defeasible, ingredient in overall justice (for example, ibid.; this also seems to have been Feinberg’s view in his groundbreaking essay of 1970) or desert-prioritizing – that is, they consider desert the most important single ingredient in justice although it can sometimes be morally outweighed by other considerations (taken collectively), for example those of institutional entitlements (for an early formulation, see Sadurski, 1985). Desert-monistic accounts of justice – that is, attempts to couch justice solely in terms of desert – notably remain as scarce as before; rare exceptions to the rule are Feldman (1995a: ‘My conception of justice is based on the ancient and plausible idea that justice is done when people receive goods and evils according to desert’, p. 573), Pojman (2001) and McLeod (2003). Nevertheless, the recent drift towards accommodating desert concerns in justice signifies a major change of academic emphasis, particularly so when viewed in conjunction with another, largely simultaneous, trend, namely one which heralds the return to an Aristotelian conception of justice as primarily, psychologically and logically a personal virtue, rather than, as Rawls held, essentially a ‘virtue of social institutions’ (1973, p. 3).

Most of the recent accounts of justice are, in fact, triply pluralistic. In the first place, they suggest various ingredients in justice, including desert, which need to be weighed against one another; in the second, they argue that desert claims are traceable to a variety of irreducibly different desert bases (a view which I, incidentally, do not share); and in the third, they accept that justice may need to be weighed against other values in overall judgements of morally right distributions of benefits and burdens. Notably, even desert-monistic theories of justice can be pluralistic in the second and third of these three senses.

Now some would argue that the reintroduction of desert in justice theories has created more problems than it has solved. For instance, the question of what constitutes the basis or bases of desert, the grounds in virtue of which a person can be said to deserve some treatment or outcome, opens up a ‘new’ source of controversy. While public opinion seems to prioritize moral virtue as the most important – or even the single all-embracing – desert basis, many philosophers disagree. Even though I happen to be more sympathetic to such a single-basis view of desert than the philosophical majority, I would be getting ahead of my argument (in Chapter 2) to press that point here. Let me, rather, at this juncture, highlight the fact that the revival of desert in academic discourse typically represents more than just a conceptual thesis about the meaning of justice. It also tends to imply a psychological thesis about the origin, development and nature of justice concerns in human beings – and, additionally, a sympathetic view of the potential relevance of the latter for the former.

What has fuelled this new-found interest in desert in philosophical circles? One reason may be the widely heard call of a leading liberal thinker who fears that the failure of liberals to take sufficient account of desert-based ‘reactive attitudes’ – attitudes that are an ingrained part of the common person’s moral sense – could be leading liberalism into political isolation (Scheffler, 1992; cf. Strawson, 1962, on ‘reactive attitudes’ as essentially natural, morally ineliminable, human reactions). Whatever liberal politicians profess, there seems to be a broad consensus among the general public that desert should carry considerable weight in the distribution of benefits and burdens (see, for example, Galston, 1991, pp. 159–62). Another is probably the recent cautious venture of a number of philosophers across the barricades traditionally separating philosophy from the social sciences. Academics working in the latter domain have never considered justice to be primarily about a set of theoretical principles, but rather about a set of powerful personal feelings – that is, a deeply emotional matter. In the philosophical, as well as in the psychological, literature, insights have been resurfacing about the essential emotionality of justice itself: namely, that justice is – as the ancients realized – not primarily a lofty intellectual virtue, grounded in abstract, detached beliefs, but rather, at bottom, an earthbound, if complex, emotional virtue, grounded in certain compelling beliefs and desires which are deeply embedded in human nature (Scheffler, 1992; Solomon, 1995). As a complex emotional virtue, justice seems to encompass certain desert-based emotions that are certainly important developmentally – and perhaps also morally – for an understanding of this virtue. Interestingly, the trend away from justice as a grand political blueprint towards its personalization, emotionalization and (by implication) depoliticization takes us right back to the familiar and ancient territory of Aristotle’s nemesis: an emotional and moral disposition towards pain felt at fortune, either good or bad, if undeserved, and towards pleasure if deserved: a disposition which forms an inseparable part of Aristotle’s overall conception of justice (cf. Curzer, 1995; see further in Chapter 3 of the present book).

However much we might welcome the recent philosophical trend towards exploring justice via desert-based emotions and through a productive, if still somewhat cautious, intercourse with the social sciences, it would be premature to assert here that the virtue of justice necessarily requires a disposition toward desert-based emotions. Qua particular emotions, the desert-based ones must pass the same test of moral justifiability as other emotions: they must be deemed both rational and morally fitting in the given circumstances (see Kristjánsson, 2002, chs 1–2). Questions still linger as to whether the desert-based emotions pass this test, as well as to what extent they should be allowed to shape our actions and allocation decisions. In other words, we cannot conclude from the assumptions that (a) justice is a virtue, (b) desert is an ingredient in justice and (c) desert-based emotions express desert claims, that the desert-based emotions are themselves virtuous and that desert claims express (other things being equal) a virtue. It could well be that these are morally neutral, or even immoral, and that there are other, perhaps institutional, aspects of justice which make it all-in-all virtuous. We still need, therefore, an independent moral justification of desert and desert-based emotions. After all, Strawson did not morally justify ‘reactive attitudes’, although he posited them as ‘essentially natural human reactions’, the absence of which would be practically inconceivable in this world (1962, pp. 195–7). In light, however, of the wide historic consensus on justice as a virtue and the recently growing consensus on the relevance of desert, in general, and desert-based emotions, in particular, for this virtue, it might seem reasonable to predict that the emotions in question will on many occasions pass the test of moral justifiability and, hence, be thought of as virtuous. But again, let us not get ahead of our argument here; this is another point that I will revisit and argue for later in the present book (Section 4.3).

Our final ‘key term’ was that of schooling. Recently, educationists have joined in the enthusiasm for justice with two major trends in values education extolling justice as a fundamental virtue to be transmitted to students. Thus proponents of ‘citizenship education’ highlight justice as a public, democratic virtue, whilst followers of ‘character education’ champion the virtuosity of justice as a personal, pre-institutional character trait. Once again, there is ample room for disagreement about which ingredients of justice should be emphasized and through what means as we explain this virtue to, and attempt to cultivate it in, our students.

Earlier I mentioned a recent venture across traditional academic lines. It is a commonplace that philosophical research on moral concepts, virtues and emotions, on the one hand, and social-science research into the same moral issues, on the other, have tended to run on parallel tracks without significant mutual acknowledgement. This familiar polarization, and its resulting lack of integrative work, is a lamentable state of affairs, not least so in the field of justice research where it often leads to the denial of insights that could have helped us to think productively about the issues at hand. One can, indeed, hardly think of another field where the combined efforts of describing the evaluative and evaluating the descriptive are as urgently called for.

One side of the coin has been the woeful lack of awareness among philosophers of the empirical research that has been conducted by social scientists concerning people’s justice-based intuitions, beliefs and emotions. When mentioned at all in philosophical writings, these tend to be dismissed out of hand as unconsidered and irrelevant: what matters is what people should think, not what they do think. The reverse side of the coin has been the corollary reluctance of social scientists to take account of work done by philosophers. In the following section, I argue for the indispensability of interdisciplinary work on justice. We should refuse the gambit offered to us by a strict descriptive–evaluative dichotomy and engage each other in debate on issues that are of relevance to both social scientists and philosophers exploring justice. Ideas of the natural origin and development of desert and other justice concerns, to take one example, are not merely psychologically interesting; they can also have important moral ramifications, especially for naturalist theories of morality such as utilitarianism and virtue ethics. These theories assume that moral theory construction must take full account of empirical research and that we need to know a lot about how human beings are before we can construct a moral code which will help them to function and flourish. Furthermore, a developmental account of justice concerns appears to be the natural starting point for the construction of educational perspectives on justice, since educational interventions – for example in values education classes at school – aimed at stimulating or stifling certain intuitions students might have about just states of affairs would, I submit, have to rely on psychological facts about the nature and origin of such intuitions. Conversely, psychologists and educators urgently need to enlist the aid of philosophers in clarifying and analysing the concepts and issues that form the objects of social-scientific inquiry into justice.

Fortunately, as already noted, the age-old disdain that philosophers and social scientists have had for each others’ work seems now gradually to be subsiding and attempts at mutual engagement in critical, interdisciplinary debates on justice are slowly gathering pace. Once the myth of the mutual irrelevance of these two academic fields to one another has been buried, we can – as I plan to do in this book – proceed on a more extended front and make capital of research carried out in otherwise distinct scholarly areas. Although my main focus will inevitably be that of a philosopher, as I am educated as one and cannot claim equal competence in the field of social science, I will make the effort at least to step across the ‘imaginary barbed wire’ (Solomon, 2002b, p. 119) between philosophy and social science and to rely as much as I can upon both foci.

Plan and Summary

The cardinal aim of this book is to fall on the cutting edge of the latest developments in discourse about distributive justice, in both philosophy and the social sciences. More specifically, I plan to (a) justify the necessary interplay between philosophers and social scientists dealing with justice, (b) probe the role of desert in justice, (c) explain the rising interest in the emotionality of justice and explore the main desert-based emotions, (d) connect my discussion to recent trends in developmental and social psychology, (e) morally justify desert and desert-based emotions and (f) provide advice as to how justice and desert should be handled in moral education at school.

In furtherance of those ambitions, I set out in the remainder of this chapter to explore the historical lack of interest in interdisciplinary work on justice. That exploration takes shape in a series of arguments for the necessity of integrative justice research which bridges the gap between insights and research findings in developmental and social psychology, education, political science, moral as well as political philosophy and philosophy of mind. I then rehearse briefly, in the final section of this chapter, some relevant points from recent debates about the nature of emotions in general, and gauge their pertinence for desert-based emotions in particular. I zero in specifically on the notion of so-called negative emotions, as some of the desert-based emotions are likely to be categorized as such. I argue that the invocation of the term ‘negative emotion’ cannot be done without cost to our understanding since it obscures all sorts of relevant complexities. There are thus no emotions to which we can helpfully refer collectively as ‘negative’, although there are of course painful emotions, emotions that evaluate states of affairs negatively, emotions that are negatively morally evaluated and so forth. Furthermore, while attempts are under way to reappraise various (commonly) negatively evaluated emotions, those attempts involve different kinds of arguments that cannot and should not be collected together as ‘defences of negative emotions’. My discussion here points to various topics that receive more sustained scrutiny in subsequent chapters.

Chapter 2 is about the concept of desert: its contours and implications, as well as its role in justice. I argue that desert claims have a single basis, moral virtue, and offer four main reasons for this being the most philosophically illuminating and serviceable account of desert: (1) it has strong intuitive appeal; (2) it helps to account for the sense in which need is, and also the sense in which need is not, relevant for justice; (3) it sheds light on the controversial issue of if and how responsibility is required for desert attribution; and (4) it best accords with social-science research on what people actually think desert is. This account is set in the context of post-Feinbergian analyses of the ingredients of justice, and it is compared to other accounts of the basis or bases of desert.

Despite the resurgence of interest in the emotions, which goes back all the way to the 1970s, not much attention has been focused, until quite recent...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Nature of Desert
• 3 Desert-Based Emotions
• 4 From Development to Justification
• 5 From Theory to Practice: The Schooling of Justice
• References
• Index