Applicative Justice

Naomi Zack is professor of philosophy at the University of Oregon. She is author and editor of a dozen books, including White Privilege and Black Rights: The Injustice of U.S. Police Racial Profiling and Homicide (2015); The Ethics and Mores of Race: Equality after the History of Philosophy (2011); Ethics for Disaster (2009).

• PrefaceIntroduction: Key Ideas and Chapter Scopes1. Ideal Theory, Nonideal Theory, and Empirical Political Theory2. Limits of Law and Government3. Ideal Equality and Real Inequality4. The Distribution of Procedural Justice5. Discourse, Prophecy, and Atmosphere6. The Discourse of Political Activism7. Postscript: An Invitation to the ReaderNotesSelect BibliographyIndexAbout the Author

Zack draws on empirical pragmatism to define applicative justice, because ‘Rawlsian ideal theorizing has nothing to offer for correcting real life injustice.’ The approach is based on Arthur Bentley’s claims in The Process of Government (1908) that just law can coexist with unjust practices, and that institutions and rules are nothing more than the actual realizations associated with them. A central example is the United Nations' Declaration of Human Rights promotion of a ‘general equality principle,’ which has not been a serious interest to world leaders. Applicative justice is the ‘extension of received functions of ordinary justice under ordinary law, to those who have been denied them in modern democratic societies.’ A barrier to achieving this is facing the delusion of the power of academic speech to change reality, and that social construction of race ‘may require the kind of faith found in activists within the black prophetic tradition.’. . .An excellent supplemental text for any course on justice.Summing Up:Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty.