Ethics of Justice Without Illusions

Louis E. Wolcher is a Professor of Law at University of Washington, USA.

• PART ONE: A FRAMEWORK FOR THINKING THE ETHICS OF THE REAL 1. Indicating the Pathway: Prologue: questioning the ethical sufficiency of unity and truth; the structure of the book; The fundamental question; The triune Politics/Law/Justice; "Attention must be paid" ; The continuum War—Peace. 2. The Journey to Disenchantment: Generality; Beyond Transcendence and the phenomenon of Logical Transcendence; Law’s Task and the legal division of human suffering. 3. The Rise of the Particular: The lost nimbus; The ghost of the particular; Ontological particularity. 4. On Speechlessness: The speechless particular; The signifying face versus the enigmatic particular; The speechlessness of nature; Discourse and its antithesis. PART TWO: SOME PARTICULAR PROBLEMS OF THE PARTICULAR 5. International Law: Universal Human Rights and Cultural Diversity: The origins of "diversity"; The dialectics of unity and diversity; The problem of linguistic diversity; The relativity of universality; The haunting; Xerxes whips the Hellespont. 6. Business: Asking the Right Question in Business Ethics: "Can we harmonize ethical questions?"; Standard of conduct versus standard of review; The business judgment rule as ethical cover; Corporate social responsibility versus individual ethical responsibility; Command-and-control ethics; The business ethics question par excellence: "Who am I?" 7. Social Science: Senseless Kindness and the Politics of Cost-Benefit Analysis: What and why; Why and how; The phenomenon of senseless kindness; The challenge to CBA posed by the phenomenon of senseless kindness; The "preference for altruism"; Economic rationality and the problem of selecting the right "ex ante"; The significance of market "facts": CBA’s inherent antipathy to democratic politics; The politics of CBA. 8. Postscript: The problem of the subject(s); The completely broken heart.

The Ethics of Justice Without Illusions is a detailed and incisive book that critically examines the extent to which the practical, day-to-day operations of a modern legal system assist or hinder it in its aim of providing justice. Wolcher seeks out the injustices which are routinely created by the processes and procedures of legal decision making. This book finds those shortcomings of the legal system and aims to show how they are explained by those same decision-making processes. Wolcher then explores the disenchantment and disillusionment that can occur when someone experiences these shortcomings first-hand in the gap between law and justice, and discusses what might then be done with that disenchantment by someone striving to live ethically within such a legal system. This book grasps and painstakingly unpacks a crucial issue in applied ethics and critical legal theory. I would strongly recommend it to readers interested in those fields, and to anyone for whom the feeling of disenchantment with the law is familiar. --- Liam Patrick Moore, 37 Philosophy in Review 177-79 (2017).