Applicative Justice
The story of how President Lyndon B. Johnson came to sign into US law the Civil Rights Act of 1964 has many anecdotal sidebars and conflicting accounts, which can be distilled into these three facts: He was a Southerner, from a culture that would be considered unjustly racist...
Naomi Zack
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
1,405
Applicative Justice
I aim to philosophically reconcile ideas of justice with practices of injustice and end up with rational grounds for optimism and realistic foundations for action. Pragmatism is consulted because my method arrives at its goal, organically, and not teleologically. I use an empirical theoretical method to understand political life and envision real life action toward practical goals. I begin with...
Naomi Zack
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
2,826
Applicative Justice
I begin here with criticism of Rawlsian ideal and nonideal theory, from the perspective and starting point of a concern with injustice. That criticism discloses the necessity for a more empirical approach to justice. Arthur Bentley’s pragmatic theory of government is introduced to help specify the subject described by empirical political theory.
Naomi Zack
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
12,229
Applicative Justice
In chapter 1, we considered the need for an accurate description of government or political life for the subject matter of an empirical approach to the correction of injustice. Bentley’s analysis of government as process and his insistence that societal events and conditions be explained by other societal events and conditions is a more productive empirical methodology than inferring...
Naomi Zack
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
12,653
Applicative Justice
Equality has been a humanitarian idea since antiquity, but the word or concept is loose, tethered on one end to equality according to law and on the other to spiritual equality. Equality in law, or formal equality, has been the goal of many progressive and liberatory movements, but once achieved it seems not to fulfill what progressives had in mind. In the American struggles concerning race and...
Naomi Zack
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
11,252
Applicative Justice
As we saw at the end of chapter 3, Amartya Sen said that “the subject of fair process and a fair deal” goes beyond individuals’ capabilities and advantages, into procedural concerns.Ibid., 297. In Development as Freedom,...
Naomi Zack
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
14,151
Applicative Justice
The term “discourse” can encompass all human interactions. Voting, buying a hat online, and publishing an academic paper are all forms of discourse. Discourse also includes art, emotional expression, moral response, political demonstration, and violence. Here, “discourse” refers to a part of political life or government process, in holistic Bentleyan terms. Oppositional...
Naomi Zack
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
12,702
Applicative Justice
Active discourse is oppositional action by nongovernment individuals and groups and not all of it is political. Political active discourse or political activism has a verbal form in descriptions of existing unjust conditions and goals for justice, and descriptions of strategies and tactics for action; its nonverbal form is real life action. Speech and writing are not action, no matter how...
Naomi Zack
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
14,813
Applicative Justice
I have tried throughout this book to be only as abstract and idealistic as absolutely necessary. I have followed Bentley’s idea that political action in reality should be considered along with words, as part of political life. I have insisted that not only is an ideal of justice unnecessary but that it distracts us from what we really care about in real life, which is injustice in a...
Naomi Zack
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
2,732
Applicative Justice
Naomi Zack
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
4,685
Applicative Justice
“A Time to Kill” (film),7.7 ,
Naomi Zack
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
3,923
Applicative Justice
Naomi Zack received her PhD in philosophy from Columbia University in 1970 and has been professor of philosophy at the University of Oregon since 2001. She...
Naomi Zack
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
403