Title: Justice, Conflict, and Adversary Argument: An Examination of Stuart Hampshire's Ideas and Their Implications for American Public Administration
Abstract: ABSTRACTThis article draws on the ideas of Stuart Hampshire to examine the political practices of our culture as a basis for deriving a shared understanding of justice. It is argued here that such practices intimate a notion of procedural or hearing the other side: the idea that there is virtue in settling the various disputes that arise among us concerning our different interests and conceptions of the good, including our different conceptions of substantive justice, by processes of adversarial argument rather than force. The article also argues that, if public scholars and practitioners wish to foster procedural justice, then, they need to have an understanding of and appreciation for our constitutional practices of adversarial argument, as well as seeking other ways of promoting such adversarial argument within their own particular agencies and organizations.How best to secure in our relationships with one another in society is a question that has arguably been central to political discourse since at least Plato. Moreover, it is also a question that, at least since the emergence of the so-called new public administration and equity in the late 1960's, has garnered some attention within the field of public (for recent reviews of this literature, see Wooldridge & Gooden, 2009; Guy & McCandless, 2012). Early writers in this area, such as David Hart (1974) and George Frederickson (1976) drew on the work of John Rawls (1971) to develop a theory of social equity that would be applicable to public administration. However, as Charles Abel and Arthur Sementelli argue, in their recent account of how the idea of relates to public administration, conception of must remain essentially contested (2007, 13) so that theory can ever be a final account of (27).Nonetheless, simply because the meaning of is contestable does not mean that has no meaning at all. In fact, As Abel and Sementelli emphasize, drawing on the ideas of Wittgenstein, justice is not a free-floating concept: the term cannot mean just anything at all. It is grounded in the particular social practices of a people, in their culture, in their traditions (23). Consistent with the emphasis that Abel and Sementelli place here on the importance of our social practices in discerning the meaning of justice, this paper examines the political practices of our culture as a basis for deriving a shared understanding of justice. Drawing on the ideas of Stuart Hampshire, it is argued that such practices typically intimate, although obviously never perfectly realize, a notion of procedural or hearing the other side: the idea that there is virtue in settling the various disputes that arise among us concerning our different interests and conceptions of the good, including our conceptions of substantive justice, by processes of adversarial argument rather than force or violence. It is further argued that, if public administrators wish to foster procedural justice, then, they need to have an understanding of and appreciation for our constitutional practices of adversarial argument, as well as seeking other ways of promoting such adversarial argument within their own particular agencies and organizations.THE CONTESTABILITY OF JUSTICE AND CONCEPTIONS OF THE GOODIt is useful to begin here by observing again, as noted above, that is an essentially contestable concept in that individuals in any particular society may be expected to entertain a variety of different and often conflicting notions regarding its exact meaning. These conflicts about the meanings of arise not, as is so often supposed by some observers, simply because human beings are often loath to embrace a notion of that would harm their own particular economic interests. Rather, such conflicts also arise because any notion of is inevitably tied to a particular moral viewpoint or particular conception of the good that men and women happen to hold in a particular culture and time. …
Publication Year: 2014
Publication Date: 2014-12-01
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 1
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