Vol. XXXVIII / 1 - Studia Moralia

THE INJUSTICE OF JUSTICE AND THE JUSTICE OF INJUSTICE 239
1. The understanding of injustice
There are three major issues dealt with in psychological
research regarding the way that people understand and use
concepts of justice. The first deals with how much influence
one’s intellectual definition of justice or injustice has upon
actual behavior; The second deals with whether justice and
injustice are conceptualized primarily in terms of equity,
equality, or humanitarian concerns (such as need); The third
deals with the reality of gender differences in the
conceptualization of what justice is and in the use of the concept
in reasoning about morality.
Does reasoning about justice make a difference?
A few famous experiments in the history of moral
psychology have called into question the real importance of the
way that people intellectually think about justice with respect to
the consequent effect upon their actual behavior. The first is
Stanley Milgram’s well-known experiment, 25 in which the
majority of his experimental subjects were shown to be capable
of inflicting painful electric shocks on another person, even to
the point of doing serious physical harm, in spite of their firm
beliefs about the injustice of doing so, extreme feelings of
anxiety while doing so, and their own prior self-evaluations
which indicated that they could not “see” a situation in which it
would be justifiable for them to do so. 26 The only variable which
25
Milgram’s experiment was really a series of different experiments
carried out over several years. For information regarding the details of all of
the different variations, see S. MILGRAM, “Behavioral Study of Obedience,”
Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 67 (1963), pp. 371-378; Idem.,
“Some Conditions of Obedience and Disobedience to Authority,” Human
Relations 18 (1965), pp. 57-76; Idem., Obedience to Authority (New York:
Harper & Row, 1974).
26
As Sabini and Silver point out, the tendency to participate in the
injustice was even more pronounced when the role assigned was that of a
cooperator as opposed to being the direct perpetrator of another’s suffering:
“Each of the 110 people claimed that he would disobey at some point.
Milgram, aware that people would be unwilling to admit that they