Vol. XXXVIII / 1 - Studia Moralia

THE INJUSTICE OF JUSTICE AND THE JUSTICE OF INJUSTICE 241
Hartshorne and May also found little correlation between
children’s concepts of fairness and justice and their actual
behavior when placed in moral situations. 29 On the other hand,
the research carried out in the realm of moral development
theory has provided a substantial amount of data which
indicates that the way individuals conceive of justice and
injustice really does have an impact upon the way they reason
about their choices in behavioral situations, and this reasoning
in turn does causally impact their actual behavior. 30 Particularly
striking are the studies carried out by Haan, Smith and Block, 31
which demonstrated a strong correlation between Kohlberg’s
stages of moral development and active participation in the freespeech
movement sit-in at the University of California at
Berkeley in the 1960’s.
While not constituting an empirical proof either way
concerning the influence of thinking about justice upon actual
behavior, these experimental results certainly call into question
the efficacy and importance of people’s intellectual beliefs about
what constitutes justice or injustice in guiding their actual
Morality, Moral Behavior, and Moral Development (New York: John Wiley &
Sons, 1984), p. 187.
29
Hartshorne and May wanted to establish a link between awareness of
moral standards of conduct and the actual effect this knowledge has upon
behavior. They studied several different immoral activities which comprised
stealing, lying, and cheating in more than 30 different situations, and found
an extremely low correlation between their subjects knowledge that an
activity is morally wrong, and their refraining from such activity in actual
behavior. For the full details of the experiment and its other general
conclusions, see H. HARTSHORNE and M. MAY, Studies in the Nature of
Character (3 Vols.). Vol. 1, Studies in Deceit; Vol. 2, Studies in Self-Control;
Vol. 3 Studies in the Nature of Character (New York: Macmillan, 1928-1930).
30
For a broad survey of experiments which provide this type of data, see
A. BLASI, “Bridging Moral Cognition and Moral Action: A Critical Review of
the Literature,” Psychological Bulletin 88 (1980), pp. 1-45.
31
The force of this study is compelling, since it studied actual behavior
in a real-life situation rather than in the artificial context of a psychology
laboratory. For details see N. HAAN, M. SMITH, and J. BLOCK, “Moral
Reasoning of Young Adults: Political-Social Behavior, Family Background,
and Personality Correlates,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 10
(1968), pp. 183-201.