Markus D. Dubber

At points better than I anticipated. Any weaknesses flowed from the author's repeated and confusing attempts to forge a distinction between the "sense of justice" and the "sense of justice". To the extent this marks a theoretically interesting point, he should have labeled it with a less puerile strategy.

The groundings in Rawls and Kant will prove useful to those who didn't see that coming from the definition of sense of justice as "nothing less than the bundle of cognitive and affective capacities which connects individuals in a modern pluralistic state.... The sense of justice is best viewed as a formal capacity for understanding and following principles of justice, no mater what they might be. It's not a source of principles of justice, nor a guide to their discovery." He mentions the role of juries as purported embodiments of a community's sense of justice, but he would have spend more time on this, and less perhaps on some of the arcania of philosophical distinctions. He also shortchanges the grounding of the sense of justice in our biological natures, which would have it less to do with morality and more with social psychology. He touches on all these angles, but I think he fails to adequately identify where this central ability to empathize comes from.… (altro)