Might individuals whose talents can bring them high rewards in the labour market have a duty not to make use of their bargaining power, but instead be willing to work for a fair wage — which if fairness is understood in egalitarian terms might mean the same wage as everyone else perhaps with extra compensation for those whose labour is unusually burdensome? Rawls, as we saw above, argued that economic justice meant arranging social and economic inequalities to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged, and in formulating the principle in this way he assumed that some inequalities might serve as incentives to greater production that would also raise the position of the worst-off group in society.
But if individuals were willing to forego incentives, and so economic inequalities served no useful purpose, then the arrangement that worked to the greatest benefit of the otherwise least advantaged would be one of strict equality.
As citizens designing our institutions we are supposed to be guided by the difference principle, but as private actors in the marketplace, we are permitted to ignore that principle and bargain for higher wages, even though doing so will work to the disadvantage of the worst-off group.
Justice, according to Cohen, requires us to embrace an ethos of service that disdains material incentives. Why might we hesitate before agreeing that in cases such as these, justice requires people to refrain from doing things that they are permitted to do by the public rules of their society passing on benefits to their children; seeking higher wages?
One reason is that the refraining is only going to have a significant effect if it is practised on a large scale, and individuals have no assurance that others will follow their example; meanwhile they or their children will lose out relative to the less scrupulous. A connected reason has to do with publicity: it may be hard to detect whether people are following the required ethos or not see Williams Is the person who sends her child to a private school because she claims he has special needs that the local state school cannot meet being sincere, or is she just trying to buy him comparative advantage?
How can we tell whether the person who claims more money, but merely, he says, as compensation for the unusual stress that his work involves, is reporting honestly?
Attending to the scope , as well as the content , of justice is important. Recent philosophical writing on justice has drawn attention to forms of injustice that do not involve the material treatment that people receive, either from other persons or from institutions, but the harms they suffer through failures of recognition. They are impacted by social norms and social practices that diminish their sense of agency and induce them to see themselves as of lesser value than others.
What, then, does it mean to be recognized? In general it means to be viewed and treated by others in the way that is appropriate to the features that you possess, but most philosophers regard recognition as multidimensional.
In particular, they distinguish between being recognized as an equal, where a person is accorded the kind of standing that gives them an equal status with other members of the relevant group, and being recognized for having characteristics, achievements or an identity that may be uniquely their own.
Recognition in this second sense may involve the unequal granting of social esteem. Justice as recognition, therefore, is internally complex. The question that arises is how best to understand the relationship between justice of this kind and distributive justice, involving the allocation of material resources and so forth.
For Nancy Fraser, by contrast, recognition and redistribution are seen as two mutually irreducible but jointly necessary conditions for social justice.
Justice as recognition requires cultural shifts in the way that different forms of identity and different types of achievement are valued that are independent of the institutional changes required to achieve distributive justice. A particular form of recognitional injustice is epistemic injustice as diagnosed by Miranda Fricker Fricker This occurs when someone is wronged in their capacity as a source of knowledge, and it takes two main forms: testimonial injustice and hermeneutic injustice.
She argues that testimonial injustice matters for two reasons. First, the person who suffers from it is less able to protect or advance their interests — for example they are less likely to be believed when having to defend themselves in court. Hermeneutical injustice arises in the context of unequal relationships in which the subordinated party lacks the concept or concepts needed to make sense of their experience and thereby to challenge their subordination.
Fricker uses the example of a woman who suffered sexual harassment at the time before feminists had developed that concept, and so had no adequate word to describe what she was experiencing. However she treats epistemic justice as a virtue that individual hearers can develop, in contrast to recognition theorists like Fraser and Honneth for whom achieving recognitional justice requires collective action to change social and cultural norms on the part of misrecognized groups.
Can justice be understood in utilitarian terms? This may in the first place depend on how we interpret utilitarianism. We treat it here as a normative theory whose aim is to supply a criterion — the greatest happiness principle — that can be used, directly or indirectly, both by individuals and by institutions such as states in deciding what to do, rather than simply as a tool for evaluating states of affairs.
Utilitarianism cannot plausibly provide a theory of justice unless it is interpreted in this action-guiding way, in light of what was said above about justice and agency.
We also assume that the most likely candidate will be a rule-utilitarian view that treats principles of justice as belonging to the set of rules which when followed by the relevant agents will tend to produce the greatest total utility for different ways of formulating this view, see the entry on rule consequentialism. Most utilitarians have regarded it as part of their task in defending utilitarianism to show that it can both accommodate and explain much of what we intuitively believe about justice.
This is certainly true of two of the greatest among them, John Stuart Mill and Sidgwick, both of whom went to considerable lengths to show that familiar principles of justice could be given a utilitarian rationale Mill Utilitarianism , ch. If we follow the lead of Mill and Sidgwick in wishing to take seriously how justice is commonly understood, the utilitarian has two challenges to face.
First he or she must show that the demands of justice as commonly understood correspond roughly to the rules that when followed by persons, or implemented by institutions, are most conducive to the greatest happiness.
They need not mirror the latter exactly, because utilitarians will argue, as both Mill and Sidgwick did, that our intuitions about justice are often ambiguous or internally inconsistent, but there must be enough overlap to warrant the claim that what the utilitarian theory can accommodate and explain is indeed justice. Second, some explanation must be given for the distinctiveness of justice.
Why do we have a concept that is used to mark off a particular set of requirements and claims if the normative basis for these requirements and claims is nothing other than general utility? What accounts for our intuitive sense of justice? The task confronting the utilitarian, then, is to systematize our understanding of justice without obliterating it. By way of illustration, both Mill and Sidgwick recognize that desert , of both reward and punishment, is a key component of common understandings of justice, but they argue that if we remain at the level of common sense when we try to analyse it, we run into irresolvable contradictions.
Similar reasoning applies to the principles of punishment: the rules we should follow are the rules that are most conducive to the ends for which punishment is instituted, such as deterring crime.
To explain the distinctiveness of justice, Mill suggests that it designates moral requirements that, because of their very great importance to human well-being, people have a right to have discharged, and are therefore matters of perfect obligation.
A person who commits an injustice is always liable to punishment of some kind, he argues. So he explains our sense of justice in terms of the resentment we feel towards someone who breaches these requirements.
Sidgwick, who laid greater stress than Mill on the connection between justice and law, also underlined the relationship between justice and gratitude, on one side, and resentment, on the other, in order to capture the way in which our concern for justice seems to differ from our concern for utility in general.
Yet despite these efforts to reconcile justice and utility, three serious obstacles still remain. The first concerns what we might call the currency of justice: justice has to do with the way that tangible benefits and burdens are assigned, and not with the happiness or unhappiness that the assignees experience.
It is a matter of justice, for example, that people should be paid the right amount for the jobs that they do, but, special circumstances aside, it is no concern of justice that John derives more satisfaction from his fairly-earned income than Jane does from hers but see Cohen for a different view. There is so to speak, a division of labour, under which rights, opportunities, and material benefits of various kinds are allocated by principles of justice, while the conversion of these into units of utility or disutility is the responsibility of each individual recipient see Dworkin , ch.
Utilitarians will therefore find it hard to explain what from their point of view seems to be the fetishistic concern of justice over how the means to happiness are distributed, rather than happiness itself. The second obstacle is that utilitarianism judges outcomes by totalling up utility levels, and has no independent concern for how that utility is distributed between persons.
Defenders of utilitarianism will argue that when the conduct-guiding rules are being formulated, attention will be paid to distributive questions. In particular, when resources are being distributed among people we know little about individually, there are good reasons to favour equality, since in most cases resources have diminishing marginal utility — the more of them you have, the less satisfaction you derive from additional instalments.
Yet this is only a contingent matter. This seems repugnant to justice. Rules are assessed strictly in the light of the consequences of adopting then, not in terms of their intrinsic properties. Of course, when agents follow rules, they are meant to do what the rule requires rather than to calculate consequences directly. Backward-looking reasons have to be transmuted into forward-looking reasons in order to count.
But justice, although not always backward-looking in the sense explained, often is. What is due to a person is in many cases what they deserve for what they have done, or what they are entitled to by virtue of past transactions. So even if it were possible to construct a forward-looking rationale for having rules that closely tracked desert or entitlement as these are normally understood, the utilitarian still cannot capture the sense of justice — why it matters that people should get what is due to then — that informs our common-sense judgements.
Utilitarians might reply that their reconstruction preserves what is rationally defensible in common sense beliefs while what it discards are elements that cannot survive sustained critical reflection. The shortcomings of utilitarianism have prompted several recent philosophers to revive the old idea of the social contract as a better way of bringing coherence to our thinking about justice.
The idea here is not that people actually have entered a contract to establish justice, or that they should proceed to do so, but that we can understand justice better by asking the question: what principles to govern their institutions, practices and personal behaviour would people choose to adopt if they all had to agree on them in advance?
The contract, in other words, is hypothetical; but the search for agreement is meant to ensure that the principles chosen would, when implemented, not lead to outcomes that people could not accept.
Thus whereas a utilitarian might, under some circumstances, be prepared to support slavery — if the misery of the slaves were outweighed by the heightened pleasures of the slave-owners — contractarians claims that no-one could accept a principle permitting slavery, lest they themselves were destined to be slaves when the principle was applied.
The problem that contractarians face is to show how such an agreement is possible. If we were to ask people, in the real world, what principles they would prefer to live under, they are likely to start from a position of quite radical disagreement, given their interests and their beliefs.
Some might even be willing to endorse slavery, if they were fairly certain that they would not end up as slaves themselves, or if they were sado-masochists who viewed the humiliations inflicted on slaves in a positive light. So in order to show how agreement could be achieved, contractarians have to model the contracting parties in a particular way, either by limiting what they are allowed to know about themselves or about the future, or by attributing to them certain motivations while excluding others.
Since the modelling can be done differently, we have a family of contractarian theories of justice, three of whose most important members are the theories of Gauthier, Rawls and Scanlon. Gauthier presents the social contract as a bargain between rational individuals who can gain through co-operating with one another, but who are competing over the division of the resulting surplus.
He assumes that each is interested only in trying to maximise his own welfare, and he also assumes that there is a non-co-operative baseline from which the bargaining begins — so nobody would accept a solution that left her less well off than in the baseline condition. Each person can identify the outcome under which they fare best — their maximum gain — but they have no reason to expect others to accept that. Gauthier argues that rational bargainers will converge on the principle of Minimax Relative Concession , which requires each to concede the same relative proportion of their maximum possible gain relative to the non-co-operative baseline.
Thus suppose there is a feasible arrangement whereby each participant can achieve two-thirds of their maximum gain, but no arrangement under which they all do better than that, then this is the arrangement that the principle recommends. Each person has made the same concession relative to the outcome that is best for them personally — not accepting the same absolute loss of welfare, let it be noted, but the same proportionate loss.
Part III. But the larger question is whether a contract modelled in this way is an appropriate device for delivering principles of justice. This seems implausible: there may be prudential reasons to recommend a distribution that reflects the outcome that self-interested and rational bargainers would arrive at, but claims of justice need a different basis. First, the shape of the theory has evolved from its first incarnation in Rawls through his major work A Theory of Justice Rawls and on to Rawls and Rawls His principles, which are discussed elsewhere see the entry on John Rawls , can be defended on their own merits as a theory of social justice for a modern liberal society, even if their contractual grounding proves to be unsound.
Rawls presents the contracting parties as seeking to advance their own interests as they decide which principles to favour, but under two informational constraints. This means that they have no basis on which to bargain for advantage, and have to consider themselves as generic persons who might be male or female, talented or untalented, and so forth.
The problem for Rawls, however, is to show that the principles that would be selected in such an original position are in fact recognizable as principles of justice. This, however, would bring the theory very close to utilitarianism, since the natural method of weighing primary goods is to ask how much utility having a given quantity of each is likely, on average, to bring for the claim that utilitarianism would be chosen in a Rawlsian original position, see Harsanyi Since Rawls wishes to reject utilitarianism, he has to adjust the psychology of the parties in the original position so that they reason differently.
Thus he suggests that, at least in developed societies, people have special reason to prioritise liberty over the other goods and to ensure that it is equally distributed: he argues that this is essential to safeguard their self-respect.
When he turns to the distribution of income and wealth, Rawls has to show why his choosers would pick the difference principle, which considers only the position of the worst-off social group, over other principles such as maximising average income across the whole society. For example, they are said to be much more concerned to achieve the minimum level of income that the difference principle would guarantee them than to enjoy increases above that level. In his later work, he abandons this reliance on maximin reasoning and gives greater prominence to another argument hinted at in Theory.
This portrays the contracting parties as starting out from the presumption that income and wealth should be distributed equally, but then recognizing that all can benefit by permitting certain inequalities to arise.
When these inequalities are governed by the difference principle, they can be justified to everyone, including the worst off, thus creating the conditions for a more stable society. But we need then to ask why equal distribution should be treated as the benchmark, departures from which require special justification. Although Rawls throughout presents his theory of justice as contractarian, we can now see that the terms of the contract are in part determined by prior normative principles that Rawls engineers the parties to follow.
So in contrast to Gauthier, it is no longer simply a case of self-interested contractors negotiating their way to an agreement. Rawls candidly admits that the contractual situation has to be adjusted so that it yields results that match our pre-existing convictions about justice. But then we may ask how much work the contractual apparatus is really doing see Barry , ch. Like Rawls, Scanlon is concerned to develop an alternative to utilitarianism, and he does so by developing a test that any candidate moral principle must pass: it must be such that no-one could reasonably reject it as the basis for informed, unforced general agreement see the entry on contractualism.
They are able to see what effect adopting any proposed principle would have on them personally. If that effect is unacceptable to them, they are permitted to reject it. Each person has, so to speak, a veto on any general principle for regulating conduct. Those that survive this test are defensible as principles of justice — Scanlon concedes that there might be alternative sets of such principles appropriate to different social conditions.
It might seem, however, that giving each person a veto would lead straightforwardly to deadlock, since anyone might reject a principle under which he fared badly relative to some alternative. Here the idea of reasonable rejection becomes important.
It would not, Scanlon thinks, be reasonable to reject a principle under which one does badly if the alternatives all involve someone else faring worse still. But this is not the conclusion that Scanlon draws though he acknowledges that there might be special reasons to follow Rawls in requiring basic social institutions to follow the difference principle.
The claims of other groups must be considered too. If a policy greatly benefits many others, while slightly worsening the position of a few, though without leaving them very badly off, it may well not be rejectable. Scanlon also says that a person can have a reason for rejecting a principle if it treats them unfairly, say by benefitting some but not others for arbitrary reasons.
This presupposes a norm of fairness that the contractarian theory does not itself attempt to explain or justify. So it looks as though the purpose of the theory is to provide a distinctive account of moral reasoning and moral motivation but not to defend any substantive principles of distributive justice.
But we should not be too hasty to assume that what justice demands is always equality, whether of treatment or of outcome. Perhaps it does so only in a formal sense. As we saw in sect 1. But, as Aristotle among others saw, justice also involves the idea of proportional treatment, which implies recipients getting unequal amounts of whatever good is at issue Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics , Book V, ch. If A is twice as deserving or twice as needy as B , justice may require that she receives more than B does.
So here formal equality of treatment — the same rule applied to both — leads to an unequal outcome. Again, when justice takes the conservative form of respect for existing entitlements or legitimate expectations see para 2. So we need to ask about the circumstances in which justice requires a substantively equal distribution of advantages. One rather obvious case occurs when the members of the group within which the distribution is going to occur have no relevant distinguishing features, so there are no grounds on which some can claim greater shares of benefit than others.
Suppose a group experiences a windfall gain for which no-one can claim any credit: a pot of gold somehow appears in their midst. Then unless any member can make a justice-related claim for a larger-than-equal share — say that she has special needs that she lacks sufficient resources to meet — an equal distribution of the gold is what justice demands, since any other distribution would be arbitrary.
Equality here is the default principle that applies in the absence of any special claims that can be presented as reasons of justice.
Equality also acts as a default in circumstances where, although people may indeed have unequal claims to whatever good is being distributed, we have no reliable way of identifying and measuring those claims. By sharing the good equally, we can at least ensure that every claim has been partially satisfied.
Any other distribution must leave at least one person with less this of course assumes that there is no threshold amount of the drug beneath which it is ineffective; if that assumption is wrong, justice under the stated conditions might require a lottery in which the chosen ones receive threshold-size doses.
If justice requires equality only by default, it might seem to apply only in a narrow range of cases. How could egalitarian justice be made more robust?
One approach involves declaring a wider range of factors irrelevant to just distribution. This captures a widespread intuition that people should not be advantaged or disadvantaged by virtue of their race or gender, but extends it more controversially to all personal features with a genetic basis, such as natural talents and inborn dispositions.
In doing so, it discounts most claims of desert, since when people are said to deserve benefits of various kinds, it is usually for performing actions or displaying qualities that depend upon innate characteristics such as strength or intelligence.
In the following section, we will see how egalitarian theories of justice have tried to incorporate some desert-like elements by way of response. But otherwise justice as equality and justice as desert appear to be in conflict, and the challenge is to show what can justify equal treatment in the face of inequalities of desert.
A second approach answers this challenge by explaining why it is positively valuable to afford people equal treatment even if they do display features that might appear to justify differential treatment. A prominent advocate of this approach is Dworkin, who argues that fundamental to justice is a principle of equal concern and respect for persons, and what this means in more concrete term is that equal resources should be devoted to the life of each member of society Dworkin The reference to membership here is not redundant, because Dworkin understands egalitarian justice as a principle that must be applied within sovereign states specifically — so in the terms of 3.
The thought is that showing persons equal respect may sometimes require us to afford them equal treatment, even in the face of relevant grounds for discrimination. As noted above, justice as simple equality of treatment seems open to the objection that it fails to acknowledge the agency of the recipients, who may have acted in ways that appear to qualify them to receive more or less of whatever benefit is being distributed.
There are, however, a number of problems it has to face. By giving scope to personal responsibility, it seeks to capture what is perhaps the most attractive part of the conventional idea of desert — that people should be rewarded for making good choices and penalised for making bad ones — while filtering out the effects of having undeserved natural talents.
But in reality the choices that people make are influenced by the talents and other qualities that they happen to have already. So if we allow someone to reap advantages by, for example, devoting long hours to learning to play the piano at a high level, we must recognize that this is a choice that she would almost certainly not have made unless early experiment showed that she was musically gifted.
We cannot say what she would have chosen to do in a counterfactual world in which she was tone deaf. There seems then to be no coherent half-way house between accepting full-blooded desert and denying that people can justly claim relative advantage through the exercise of responsibility and choice see further Miller , ch.
This will be true, for example, in any case in which people are competing to excel in some field, where successful choices made by A will worsen the comparative position of B , C , and D. We have seen that equality can sometimes be understood as required by justice; but it can also be valued independently. Indeed there can be circumstances in which the two values collide, because what justice demands is inequality of outcome. A society of equals contrasts with one in which people belong to different ranks in a social hierarchy, and behave towards one another as their relative ranking prescribes.
Different reasons can be given for objecting to social inequality, and conversely for valuing social equality see Scanlon Thus, faced with a world like the one we currently inhabit in which income differences are very large, justice theorists are likely to criticize these inequalities on grounds that they are not deserved, or arise from brute luck, etc.
Relational equality does not address issues of distribution directly, and so cannot function as a theory of justice itself, but it can provide grounds for preferring one theory of justice to its rivals — namely that implementing that particular theory is more likely to create or sustain a society of equals.
We saw at the beginning of this article that justice can take a number of different forms, depending on the practical context in which it is being applied. In these circumstances, it is natural to look for an overarching framework into which the various contextually specific conceptions of justice can all be fitted.
Three such frameworks were examined: utilitarianism, contractarianism and egalitarianism. So unless we are willing to jettison many of these convictions in order to uphold one or other general framework, we will need to accept that no comprehensive theory of justice is available to us; we will have to make do with partial theories — theories about what justice requires in particular domains of human life.
Rawls himself, despite the bold title of his first book A Theory of Justice , came to recognize that what he had outlined was at best a theory of social justice applied to the basic institutional structure of a modern liberal state. Other forms of justice — familial, allocative, associational, international — with their associated principles would be applicable in their respective domains for an even more explicitly pluralist account of justice, see Walzer ; for a fuller defence of a contextual approach to justice, see Miller , esp.
One way to loosen up our thinking about justice is by paying greater attention to the history of the concept. We can learn a great deal by reading what Aristotle, or Aquinas, or Hume, has to say about the concept, but as we do so, we also see that elements we would expect to find are missing there is nothing about rights in Aristotle, for example , while others that we would not anticipate are present.
This may in some part be due to the idiosyncrasies of each thinker, but more importantly it reflects differences in the form of social life in which each was embedded — its economic, legal and political structure, especially. Various attempts have been made to write histories of justice that are more than just catalogues of what individual thinkers have said: they aim to trace and explain systematic shifts in the way that justice has been interpreted for contrasting examples, see MacIntyre , Fleischacker , Johnston These should not be read as enlightenment stories in which our understanding of justice steadily improves as the centuries roll by.
We can get a better grasp of what justice means to us by seeing the various conceptions that compete for our attention as tied to aspects of our social world that did not exist in the past, and are equally liable to disappear in the future. Aristotle, General Topics: ethics consequentialism consequentialism: rule contractualism feminist philosophy, topics: perspectives on reproduction and the family justice: as a virtue justice: distributive justice: global justice: intergenerational justice: international distributive justice: retributive justice: transitional luck: justice and bad luck Rawls, John reflective equilibrium social contract: contemporary approaches to.
Justice: Mapping the Concept 1. Justice: Four Distinctions 2. The Scope of Justice 3. Utilitarianism and Justice 4. Contractarianism and Justice 5. Egalitarianism and Justice 6. Justice: Four Distinctions We have so far looked at four elements that are present in every use of the concept of justice.
The Scope of Justice When we raise questions about the scope of justice, we are asking about when principles of justice take effect and among whom. Redistribution Recent philosophical writing on justice has drawn attention to forms of injustice that do not involve the material treatment that people receive, either from other persons or from institutions, but the harms they suffer through failures of recognition.
Utilitarianism and Justice Can justice be understood in utilitarian terms? Contractarianism and Justice The shortcomings of utilitarianism have prompted several recent philosophers to revive the old idea of the social contract as a better way of bringing coherence to our thinking about justice.
Conclusion We saw at the beginning of this article that justice can take a number of different forms, depending on the practical context in which it is being applied. Cohen, G. Selby-Bigge, revised by P. In contexts where existing parliamentary and other structures may be relatively strong, processes may lead to respect for others who hold different beliefs and to a commitment to resolve differences through agreed-on, non-violent means.
In other contexts, where society has no political history of strong institutions, agreements can commit to acknowledgment of harms done and respect for others the future.
Institutional reconciliation : Institutional reconciliation is premised on processes whereby institutions charged with protecting fundamental freedoms and individual and collective rights win back the trust of alienated parts of society. It is often focused on justice and security institutions but can also affect institutions such as education and the media. It is relevant not only where there are relatively strong state institutions, but also where those institutions have significantly breached the public trust by committing, facilitating, or allowing massive violations.
Relationships can be built or rebuilt in different ways and to different degrees. Furthermore, reconciliation can play out on the vertical and horizontal axes to smaller or greater degrees. Restoring dignity in this sense may require processes aimed at countering negative attitudes, restoring those who suffered violations to their proper position as rights bearers and citizens, and reversing or reducing the structural causes of marginalization and discrimination.
It takes seriously the social and economic harms that have been caused by violations and taking steps to remedy them. As with transitional justice generally, context determines to a large extent what reconciliation means, what relationships need to be restored, and how much progress can be made. In South Africa , the discourse of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission emphasized largely a religious conception of reconciliation. It also invoked the notion of Ubuntu, an ethical approach that emphasizes common humanity in order to promote broader concepts of healing and harmony.
In Chile , the transition was more about the need to overcome societal divisions between the political left and right, and respect the rule of law, and protection of human rights. In Argentina , the emphasis was less on fostering respect for different political beliefs and more on restoring trust in state institutions and the demonstration of their efficacy in protecting human rights. In particular, there was a need to restore the military as an institution to its place in the democratic order and in reestablishing the rule of law over state terror.
In contexts of fragility, where institutions are weak and resources scarce, a development lens may emphasize the importance of reconciliation for notions of resilience—the capacity to absorb, recover from, and resist shocks and crises, including systemic rights violations.
Resilience in peacebuilding contexts is seen to include psychosocial recovery, social cohesion, and inclusive governance; development practitioners connect more resilient societies with levels of reconciliation and trust.
In contexts of conflict-affected states, a security lens may emphasize the importance of reconciliation for peaceful coexistence. The dynamics of armed conflicts can be more complex than those of authoritarianism, particularly in terms of the range of non-state armed actors involved, the cross-border movement of combatants, and the scale and nature of violations committed.
Reconciliation is likely to involve the reintegration of ex-combatants into their communities, often through local or traditional practices. In contexts of large-scale displacement, which are very often those of fragile and conflict-affected states, the notion of return may emphasize the importance of reconciliation for their reintegration. Reintegration may depend on reconciliation between returnees and state institutions, which failed to protect them, as well as between returnees and those who remained in their communities for the duration of the conflict.
The restoration of dignity may require specific measures, such as the restitution of land and property, and addressing any psychosocial or socioeconomic damage done. While processes of transitional justice and reconciliation may interact, the two notions should not be conflated.
Reconciliation as an outcome is only one of the potential objectives of transitional justice, and its relevance depends on each context. In Argentina, the prosecution of the military leadership and the reparations program implemented for victims were important in restoring trust in the institutions of democracy and in placing the military in its rightful place in that context.
In Chile and South Africa, a great deal of weight was placed on making the truth known about what had happened, why, and which institutions were responsible through their truth and reconciliation commissions. Potentially more important for reconciliation than the results of specific mechanisms, however, are the processes through which those mechanisms come about—the discourse in which they are discussed, the decisions through which they are shaped, and their participatory nature.
Processes, therefore, embrace consultation, media relations, gender sensitivity, political alignment, and broad civil society engagement. The case of transitional justice fostering divisions, if seen as lacking legitimacy or impartiality, is likely if it is inappropriate for the context or without participation and transparency. Reconciliation may have negative connotations if it is promoted by actors as the only possible outcome, as a substitute for accountability and recognition, or as a synonym for criminal justice.
After decades of abuses committed by the government, Morocco began to undertake a multi-stage political reform process in the country. This process, through which reconciliation became part of the public discourse, included granting amnesty to political prisoners and the return of the forcibly disappeared; creating an arbitration body to grant reparations to victims; and establishing the Equity and Reconciliation Commission IER.
A number of different measures have contributed to reform, including: individual and community reparations; history and memory initiatives; addressing structural issues that led to prior violations; and the re-establishment of trust between citizens and the state. Reconciliation in Morocco at one level has involved a socio-political process, through the creation of a political community based on democratic values.
At another level, reconciliation has involved reestablishing trust between citizen and state institutions, further emphasized by civil society activism. This has included passing a Transitional Justice Law in , which established a Truth and Dignity Commission TDC to examine and report on past abuses and the Specialized Judicial Chambers to pursue criminal accountability.
Discourse in Tunisian society involves the idea accountability should prelude reconciliation, and the relationship between the state and citizens should be reformed through the judiciary. There are also strong beliefs that reconciliation will require the recognition of long-term social exclusion and regional inequality through advocacy of civil society and the continued transitional justice process.
Steps should be taken now to ensure the participation of displaced persons and other victims in discussions about return and reconciliation upon a political settlement being reached. The priorities among refugees for a return process include security, the assurance of basic needs, access to government services, psychosocial support and family reunification.
Significant divisions have emerged and the make-up of Syrian society, as well as divisions between those who left and those who remain, will make progress toward reconciliation complicated. The term coexistence is more common than reconciliation, referring to re-establishing social ties, and is seen as an obligation. Dignity is another term used by many refugees, which is related to reconciliation, because loss of dignity is viewed as one of the most significant harms of the displacement experience.
Many seek tribal justice mechanisms because of mistrust of national and international judicial systems. Interviews with refugees and civil society actors highlight the harms and losses experienced by Syrians, both individually and collectively. Skip to main content. X Close.
International Center for Transitional Justice. The Place of Reconciliation in Transitional Justice. Paul Seils. What are the different types of reconciliation? To what degree can reconciliation be established?
Thin or minimal understandings of reconciliation, at one end of the spectrum, involve individuals, groups, and institutions peacefully coexisting but with little or no trust, respect, restoration of dignity or shared values between them.
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