The Virtues of Justice: Toward a Moral and Jurisprudential Psychology

Date01 July 2022
Published date01 July 2022
AuthorChristopher Williams,Bruce Arrigo
DOI10.1177/0306624X211066832
Subject MatterArticles
https://doi.org/10.1177/0306624X211066832
International Journal of
Offender Therapy and
Comparative Criminology
2022, Vol. 66(9) 962 –979
© The Author(s) 2021
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/0306624X211066832
journals.sagepub.com/home/ijo
Article
The Virtues of Justice: Toward
a Moral and Jurisprudential
Psychology
Christopher Williams1 and Bruce Arrigo2
Abstract
Within the theoretical literature on crime control and offender therapy, little has
been written about the importance of virtue ethics in the experience of human
justice and in the evolution of the common good. As a theory of being, the aretaic
tradition extols eudemonic existence (i.e., excellence, flourishing) as a relational habit
of developing character that is both practiced and embodied over time. What this
implies is that virtue justice depends on a set of assumptions and predispositions—
both moral and jurisprudential—whose meanings are essential to comprehending
its psychological structure. This article sets out to explore several themes that our
integral to our thesis on the virtues (i.e., the being) of justice. We reclaim justice’s
aretaic significance, critique the common conflation of justice and law, discuss how
the dominant legalistic conception of justice is rooted in a particular view of human
nature, suggest how justice might be more properly grounded in natural moral
sensibilities, and provide a tentative explication of the psychological character of justice
as a twofold moral disposition. Given this exploratory commentary, we conclude by
reflecting on how individual well-being, system-wide progress, and transformative
social change are both possible and practical, in the interest of promoting the virtues
of justice within the practice of crime control and offender therapy.
Keywords
virtue ethics, justice and law, human nature, crime control, offender therapy
Introduction
The concept of justice, in both popular and academic discourse, most always signifies
actions (i.e., serving justice or bringing someone to justice) or the consequences of
1Bradley University College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Peoria, IL, USA
2UNC Charlotte CLAS, NC, USA
Corresponding Author:
Bruce Arrigo, UNC Charlotte CLAS, 9201 University City Blvd, NC 28223-0001, USA.
Email: barrigo@uncc.edu
1066832IJOXXX10.1177/0306624X211066832International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative CriminologyWilliams and Arrigo
research-article2021
Williams and Arrigo 963
actions (i.e., having executed justice or brought about just effects). Laws and policies
are said to be “just” in this fashion. Legal verdicts, criminal punishments, and even
wars signify just action or they denote the just consequences of actions. Simply stated,
the term justice, as socially constructed, refers to something that is done to some per-
son, group or collective, or to something that is administered to some person, group or
collective following illicit actions. Thus, as a matter of underlying assumption, justice
implies a kind of calculation. Among other things, this calculation includes the weigh-
ing of interests and the assigning of rights for individuals and society. In this important
respect, then, personal freedom and the public good are understood to be balanced;
that is, they are in a state of calculated equilibrium.
The measurement of justice with actions and consequences is particularly evident
within the Western world’s criminological canon, where concerns for and about it are
largely relegated to crime control rhetoric. This philosophy of crime control centers
upon how best to do or to administer justice. This calculation of justice is evident
throughout all facets of the criminal justice system. The doing or administering of
justice can be traced, in part, to the temporal roots of criminology and the formation of
modern criminal justice, including its evolving policies of crime control.
The evolution of thought that has engulfed the study of crime and has enveloped
that of justice extends over 2000 years of recorded Western civilization. However, con-
temporary criminology’s major points of origin and foundational principles can be
sourced in intellectual transformations that occurred during the eighteenth-century
Enlightenment era (i.e., reason rather than faith) and the logical positivist (i.e., scien-
tific) revolution of the 19th century. This point of origin calculated justice through the
foundational principles (i.e., logic and rationality) of the empirical sciences (e.g.,
Burkhead, 2006; Millie, 2016; Wetzell, 2000; Williams & Arrigo, 2006). While the
broader intellectual transformations of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries brought
with them new epistemological and ontological assumptions that would shape the tra-
jectory of crime studies and the politics of crime control, they also profoundly impacted
normative reasoning (e.g., Schneewind, 1998).
For the better part of 2000 years that preceded the onset of modernity, normative
philosophy had occupied itself with the concerns of being as opposed to bringing
about, and with ways of doing rather than doing itself. In essence, modern intellectual
transformations supplanted this philosophical tradition, charting new directions for
moral reasoning and corresponding alterations in the landscape of law and politics
(Maclntyre, 1984; Reiman, 1990). Specifically, actions and consequences became
centralized in normative dialog, and in liberal rights-based concerns regarding polit-
ico-legal discourse. Firmly embedded in the musings of Cesare Beccaria, Jeremy
Bentham, and others to whom the principal assumptions of Western criminology and
criminal justice are often traced, the historical trajectory of crime and crime control
dialog evidences a tapered focus on reason and rational decision-making, right actions,
and good consequences to the near categorical exclusion of that which underlies and
gives rise to them; namely, the embodiment of character, ways-of-being, or virtue.
Indeed, previous to “enlightened” normative theorizing, justice was first and fore-
most a virtue. For the key figures of antiquity (e.g., Plato, Aristotle), justice factored

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