Vol. XXXVIII / 1 - Studia Moralia

242 STEPHEN T. REHRAUER
concrete behavior in imaginary or real-life situations. Even
people who firmly believe that injustice involves causing harm
to the innocent and that it is morally wrong to do so, at times
justify their doing so, while those who also firmly believe that
justice requires helping those in need, justify their failure to do
so. If we bear in mind that thinking can guide behavior, but that
there is no guarantee that it will do so, and that behavior also
reveals thinking even when what it reveals may be different from
the actual explanation given by the person who acts, the
apparent conflict between the two sets of data might be properly
interpreted to be the result of a conflict of justice issues. In the
good Samaritan experiment, it appears that the importance of
arriving on time and not keeping others waiting took precedence
over the obligation to help; in the Milgram experiment, either
the importance of obedience to authority, fulfilling one’s
contractual obligations, or not wanting to disappoint the
authority figure, took precedence in moral thinking over the
moral obligation not to cause pain to an innocent. “Findings of
inconsistencies may, instead, reflect the individual’s efforts at
coordinating the different types of judgments relevant to a given
behavioral situation. That is, assessments need to be made of
nonmoral social judgments and their coordination with moral
judgments.” 32 Rather than substantiating the lack of influence of
thoughts about justice and injustice on actual moral behavior,
when taken together, all of the data both positive and negative,
tend to indicate that the determinant factor in moral behavior
has to do with how one orders the many different forms of
conceiving of justice and injustice with respect to each
particular action situation.
Criteria for Distinguishing the unjust from the just
Whereas Lebacqz centers her reflection concerning injustice
primarily upon the realities of oppression and exploitation as
32
E. TURIEL and J. SMETANA, “Social Knowledge and Action: The
Coordination of Domains,” in W. Kurtines and J. GEWIRTZ, eds., Morality,
Moral Behavior, and Moral Development (New York: John Wiley & Sons,
1984), pp. 266-267.