Vol. XXXVIII / 1 - Studia Moralia

244 STEPHEN T. REHRAUER
when this ratio appears equal for all the individuals involved in
a given distribution or exchange.” 37 In laymen’s terms this could
be summarized in the formula that people should get what they
deserve. Those working within the cognitive-developmental
approach advance the proposition that people judge questions of
injustice according to the equality principle, expressed in
Kohlberg’s statement above, which maintains that all people
should receive equally and impartially based upon the
considerations of universal justice. In layman’s terms, it
amounts to the belief that each should get his equal share of the
pie. According to equity, injustice might be illustrated by a
condition in which two equally qualified and capable workers
receive differing amounts of pay for the same amount and type
of work. According to equality, injustice might be illustrated
when one racial group is consistently and arbitrarily excluded
from full participation in economic and political decision
making procedures. Humanitarian concerns temper both of
these with the consideration of the underlying fundamental
demands that being human requires. All human beings have
certain fundamental needs which they are entitled to satisfy.
There are also some actions, such as beating people, which are
in themselves unjust regardless of whether they are equitable or
equal because they are not worthy activities for human beings. 38
These distinctions are consolidated by Feinberg when he
independently derives from his threefold distinction of forms of
injustice two general types of justice which seem to cross the
37
L. FURBY, “Psychology and Justice,” p. 155.
38
Witness the following quotation taken from Gaudium et Spes 27 in
Veritatis Splendor 80: “Whatever is hostile to life itself, such as any kind of
homicide, genocide, abortion, euthanasia and voluntary suicide; whatever
violates the integrity of the human person, such as mutilation, physical and
mental torture and attempts to coerce the spirit; whatever is offensive to
human dignity, such as subhuman living conditions, arbitrary
imprisonment, deportation, slavery, prostitution and trafficking in women
and children; degrading conditions of work which treat laborers as mere
instruments of profit, and not as free responsible persons: all these and the
like are a disgrace, and so long as they infect human civilization they
contaminate those who inflict them more than those who suffer injustice,
and they are a negation of the honor due to the Creator.”