Rape and Justice in the Wife of Bath’s Tale Carissa M. Harris (blogger.com@blogger.com) An essay chapter from The Open Access Companion to the Canterbury Tales (September ) Download PDF. Introduction. Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale often offends readers’ sense of justice. It follows an unnamed knight from King Arthur’s court who rapes a maiden, avoids legal punishment, and is Aug 19, · The idea of restorative justice has been made a top priority by every advisory group for the project. But what exactly it means in reality, and how this justice is executed on-the-ground is becoming a point of frustration and debate. Several HAAB members expressed concerns that there has been months of talk about restorative justice, but no action For example, principles of distributive justice determine what counts as a "fair share" of particular good, while principles of retributive or restorative justice shape our response to activity that violates a society's rules of "fair play." Social justice requires both that the rules be
6. Jesus and Justice | Peace Theology
Justicein its broadest sense, is the principle that people receive that which they deserve, with the interpretation of what then constitutes "deserving" being impacted upon by numerous fields, with many differing viewpoints and perspectives, including the concepts of moral correctness based on ethicsrationalitylawreligionequity and fairness.
The state will sometimes endeavour to increase justice by operating courts and enforcing their rulings. Consequently, restorative justice essay, the application of justice differs in every culture. Early theories of justice were set out by the Ancient Greek philosophers Plato in his work The Republicand Aristotle restorative justice essay his Nicomachean Ethics. Restorative justice essay history various theories have been established.
Advocates of divine command theory have said that justice issues from God. In the s, philosophers such as John Locke said that justice derives from natural law. Social contract theory said that justice is derived from the mutual agreement of everyone. In the s, utilitarian philosophers such as John Stuart Mill said that justice is based on the best outcomes for the greatest number of people.
Theories of distributive justice study what is to be distributed, between whom they are to be distributed, restorative justice essay, and what is the proper distribution. Egalitarians have said that justice can only exist within the coordinates of equality.
John Rawls used a social contract theory to say that justice, and especially distributive justice, is a form of fairness, restorative justice essay. Robert Nozick and others said that property rightsalso within the realm of distributive justice restorative justice essay natural law, maximizes the overall wealth of an economic system.
Theories of retributive justice say that wrongdoing should be punished to insure justice. The closely related restorative justice also sometimes called "reparative justice" is an approach to justice that focuses on the needs of victims and offenders. In his dialogue RepublicPlato uses Socrates to argue for justice that covers both the just person and the just City State.
Justice is a proper, harmonious relationship between the warring parts of the person or city. Hence, Plato's definition of justice is that justice is the having and doing of what is one's own. A just man is a man in just the right place, doing his best and giving the precise equivalent of what he has received. This applies both at the individual level and at the universal level. A person's soul has three parts — restorative justice essay, spirit and desire.
Similarly, a city has restorative justice essay parts — Socrates uses the parable of the chariot to illustrate his point: a chariot works as a whole because the two horses' power is directed by the charioteer. Lovers of wisdom — philosophers, in one sense of the term — should rule because only they understand what is good.
If one is ill, restorative justice essay, one goes to a medic rather than a farmer, because the medic is expert in the subject of health. Similarly, one should trust one's city to an expert in the subject of the good, not to a mere politician who tries to gain power by giving people what they want, rather than what's good for them.
Socrates uses the parable of the ship to illustrate this point: the unjust city is like a ship in open ocean, restorative justice essay by a powerful but drunken captain the common peoplea group of untrustworthy advisors who try to manipulate the captain into giving them power over the ship's course the politiciansand a navigator the philosopher who is the only one who knows how to get the ship to port.
For Socrates, the only way the ship will reach restorative justice essay destination — the good — is if the navigator takes charge. Advocates of divine command theory say that justice, and indeed the whole of morality, is the authoritative command of God.
Murder is wrong and must be punished, for instance, because God says restorative justice essay so, restorative justice essay. Some versions of the theory assert restorative justice essay God must be obeyed because of the nature of his relationship with humanity, others assert that God must be obeyed because he is goodness itself, restorative justice essay, and thus doing what he says would be best for everyone.
A meditation on the Divine command theory by Plato can be found in his dialogue, Euthyphro. Called the Euthyphro dilemmait goes as follows: "Is what is morally good commanded by God because restorative justice essay is morally good, or is it morally good because it is commanded by God? A responsepopularized in two contexts by Immanuel Kant and C.
Lewisis that it is deductively valid to say that the existence of an objective morality implies the existence of God and vice versa. For advocates of the theory that justice is part of natural law e. In Republic by Platothe character Thrasymachus argues that justice is the interest of the strong — merely a name for what the powerful or cunning ruler has imposed on the people. Advocates of the social contract say that justice is derived from the mutual agreement of everyone; or, in many versions, from what they would agree to under hypothetical conditions including equality and absence of bias.
This account is considered further below, under ' Justice as Fairness '. The absence of bias refers to an equal ground for all people involved in a disagreement or trial in some cases. According to utilitarian thinkers including John Stuart Milljustice is not as fundamental as we often think.
Rather, it is derived from the more basic standard of rightness, consequentialism : what is right is what has the best consequences usually measured by the total or average welfare caused. So, the proper principles of justice are those that tend to have the best consequences. These rules may turn out to be familiar ones such as keeping contracts ; but equally, they may not, depending on the facts about real consequences.
Either way, what is important is those consequences, and justice is important, if at all, only as derived from that fundamental standard.
Mill tries to explain our mistaken belief that justice is overwhelmingly important by arguing that it derives from two natural human tendencies: our desire to retaliate against those who hurt us, or the feeling of self-defense and our ability to put ourselves imaginatively in another's place, sympathy. So, when we see someone harmed, we project ourselves into their situation and feel a desire to retaliate on their behalf.
If this process is the source of our feelings about justice, that ought to undermine our confidence in them. Distributive justice theorists generally do not answer questions of who has the right to enforce a particular favored distribution, while property rights theorists say that there is no "favored distribution.
This section describes some widely held theories of distributive justice, and their attempts to answer these questions. Social justice encompasses the just relationship between individuals and their society, often considering how privileges, opportunities, and wealth ought to be distributed among individuals. Homans suggested that the root of the concept of justice is that each person should receive rewards that are proportional to their contributions, restorative justice essay. In his A Theory of JusticeJohn Rawls used a social contract argument to show that justice, and especially distributive justice, is a form of fairness: an impartial distribution of goods.
Rawls asks us to imagine ourselves behind a veil of ignorance that denies us all knowledge of our personalities, social statuses, moral characters, wealth, talents and life plans, and then asks what theory of justice we would choose to govern our society when the veil is lifted, if we wanted to do the best that we could for ourselves.
We don't know who in particular we are, and therefore can't bias the decision in our own favour. So, the decision-in-ignorance models fairness, because it excludes selfish bias. Rawls said that each of us would reject the utilitarian theory of justice that we should maximize welfare see below because of the risk that we might turn out to be someone whose own good is sacrificed for greater benefits for others.
Instead, restorative justice essay, we would endorse Restorative justice essay two principles of justice :. This imagined choice justifies restorative justice essay principles as the principles of justice for us, because we would agree to them in a fair decision procedure. Rawls's theory distinguishes two kinds of goods — 1 the good of liberty rights and 2 social and economic goods, i. wealth, restorative justice essay, income and power — and applies different distributions to them — equality between citizens for 1equality unless inequality improves the position of the worst off for 2.
In one sense, restorative justice essay, theories of distributive justice may assert that everyone should get what they deserve. Theories vary on the meaning of what is "deserved". The main distinction is between theories that say the basis of just deserts ought to be held equally by everyone, and therefore derive egalitarian accounts of distributive justice — and theories that say the basis of just deserts is unequally distributed on the basis of, for instance, hard work, and therefore derive accounts of distributive justice by which some should have more than others.
According to meritocratic theories, goods, especially restorative justice essay and social statusshould be distributed to match individual meritwhich is usually understood as some combination of talent and hard work. According to needs -based theories, goods, especially such basic goods as restorative justice essay, shelter and medical care, restorative justice essay be distributed to meet individuals' basic needs for them.
Marxism is a needs-based theory, expressed succinctly in Marx's slogan " from each according to his ability, to each according to his need ".
In Anarchy, State, and Utopiarestorative justice essay, Robert Nozick said that distributive justice is not a matter of the whole distribution matching an ideal patternbut of each individual entitlement having the right kind of history. It is just that a person has some good especially, some property right if and only if they came to have it by a history made up entirely of events of two kinds:. If the chain of events leading up to restorative justice essay person having something meets this criterion, they are entitled to it: that they possess it is just, and what anyone else does or doesn't have restorative justice essay need is irrelevant.
On the basis of this theory of distributive justice, Nozick said that all attempts to redistribute goods according to an ideal pattern, without the consent of their owners, are theft. In particular, redistributive taxation is theft. Some property rights theorists such as Nozick also take a consequentialist view of distributive justice and say that property rights based justice also has the effect of maximizing the overall wealth of an economic system.
They explain that voluntary non-coerced transactions always have a property called Pareto efficiency. The result is that the world is better off in an absolute sense and no one is worse off. They say that respecting property rights maximizes the number of Pareto efficient transactions in the world and minimized the number of non-Pareto efficient transactions in the world i.
transactions where someone is made worse off. The result is that the world will have generated the greatest total benefit from the limited, scarce resources available in the world. Further, this will restorative justice essay been accomplished without taking anything away from anyone unlawfully.
According to the utilitarian, justice requires the maximization of the total or average welfare across all relevant individuals.
Utilitarianism, in general, says that the standard of justification for actions, institutions, or the whole world, is impartial welfare consequentialismand only indirectly, if at all, to do with rightspropertyneedor any other non-utilitarian criterion. These other criteria might be indirectly important, to the extent that human welfare involves them. But even then, such demands as human rights would only be elements in the calculation of overall welfare, not uncrossable barriers to action.
Theories of retributive justice involve punishment for restorative justice essay, and need to answer three questions:. This section considers the two major accounts of retributive justice, restorative justice essay, and their answers to these questions. Utilitarian theories look forward to the future consequences of punishment, while retributive theories look back to particular acts of wrongdoing, and attempt to balance restorative justice essay with deserved punishment, restorative justice essay.
Punishment fights crime in three ways:. So, the reason for punishment is the maximization of welfare, and punishment should be of whomever, and of whatever form and severity, restorative justice essay, are needed to meet that goal.
This may sometimes justify punishing the innocent, or inflicting disproportionately severe punishments, when that will have the best consequences overall perhaps executing a few suspected shoplifters live restorative justice essay television would be an effective deterrent to shoplifting, for instance. It also suggests that punishment might turn out never to be right, restorative justice essay, depending on the facts about what actual restorative justice essay it has.
The retributivist will think restorative justice essay is mistaken. If someone does something wrong we must respond by punishing for the committed action itself, regardless of what outcomes punishment produces. Wrongdoing restorative justice essay be balanced or made good in some way, and so the criminal deserves to be punished. It says that all guilty people, and only guilty people, deserve appropriate punishment. This restorative justice essay some strong intuitions about just punishment: that it should be proportional to the crime, and that it should be of only and all of the guilty.
Restorative justice also sometimes called "reparative justice" is an approach to justice that focuses on the needs of victims and offenders, instead of satisfying abstract legal principles or punishing the offender, restorative justice essay.
Victims take an active role in the process, while offenders are encouraged to take responsibility for their actions, "to repair the harm they've done — by apologizing, returning stolen money, or community service". It is based on a theory of justice that considers crime and wrongdoing to be an offense against an individual or community rather than the state. Restorative justice that fosters dialogue between victim and offender shows the highest rates of victim satisfaction and offender accountability.
Some modern philosophers have said that Utilitarian and Retributive theories are not mutually exclusive.
Breaking Cycles with Circles - An Essay About Restorative Justice
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Restorative justice; Abolishment of parole in the USA: Pros and cons; Deviance: Specifics and essentials; Ethics and lawbreakers; Influence of adolescent life; The alternatives to incarceration in the USA; If you would like a list of argumentative criminal justice essay topics, please let us know so we can prepare one for our blog post in the 1 day ago · What to compare and contrast essay uniforms in school argumentative essay. Happy life essay title, essay on child labour a curse to humanity benefits of restorative justice essay. Irony in shooting an elephant essay how to form a compare and contrast essay? Essay writing for best friend words to use when writing an argumentative essay Rape and Justice in the Wife of Bath’s Tale Carissa M. Harris (blogger.com@blogger.com) An essay chapter from The Open Access Companion to the Canterbury Tales (September ) Download PDF. Introduction. Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale often offends readers’ sense of justice. It follows an unnamed knight from King Arthur’s court who rapes a maiden, avoids legal punishment, and is
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