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.