Seth Lazar, Philosopher and Photographer

This paper, drawn from my M.Phil. thesis on corrective justice, explicates a concept of injury as right-violation, which can be used as a foundation for distinguishing between setbacks to interests that should, and should not, be the concern of justice, and as the object of a theory of corrective justice. It begins by introducing a hybrid theory of rights, grounded in (a) the mobilisation of our moral equality to (b) protect our most important interests, and shows how violations of rights are the concern of justice, while setbacks where one of the twin grounds of rights is defeated are not. It then looks more closely at the substantive moral components of injury, namely harm and wrong. It argues that, on the hybrid conception, harm and wrong are individually necessary and jointly sufficient components of injury, and that the disvalue of neither is reducible to the other—in particular, it is a mistake to make the disrespect identified by wrong into another damaged interest. Finally, it distinguishes between the public and private dimensions of injury, and makes some preliminary suggestions as to whether the probable remedy for these different dimensions should lie in criminal, distributive, or corrective justice.

This paper won Res Publica’s 2008 postgraduate essay prize, and was published in their Autumn 2009 edition. You can view it here: The Nature and Disvalue of Injury.

In this paper, drawn from my M.Phil. thesis on corrective justice, I ask how – and whether – the rectification of injury at which corrective justice aims is possible, and by whom it must be performed. I split the injury up into components of harm and wrong, and consider their rectification separately. First, I show that pecuniary compensation for the harm is practically plausible, because money acts as a mediator between the damaged interest and other interests. I then argue that this is also a morally plausible approach, because it does not claim too much for compensation: neither can all harms be compensated, nor can it be said when compensation is paid that the status quo ante has been restored. I argue that there is no conceptual reason for any particular agent paying this compensation. I then turn to the wrong, and reject three proposed methods of rectification. The first aims to rectify the wrong by rectifying the harm; the second deploys punitive damages; the third, punishment. After undermining each proposal, I argue that the wrong can only be rectified by a full apology, which I disaggregate into the admission of causal and moral responsibility, repudiation of the act, reform, and, in some cases, disgorgement and reparations, which I define as a good faith effort to share the burden of the victim’s harm. I argue, further, that only the injurer herself can make a full apology, and it is not something that can be coerced by other members of society. As such, whether rectification of the wrong can be a matter of corrective justice is left an open question.

This paper was published in the August 2008 edition of Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, a philosophy journal published by Springer-Kluwer. You can see it here: Corrective Justice and the Possibility of Rectification.