Concepts of justice relevant to making personal and public decisions about education.
Purpose
To clarify a concept of formative justice that persons and the public often ignore in making decisions about educational effort.
Setting
“The windmills of your mind.”
Research Design
Reflective essay.
Conclusions/Recommendations
• Problems of justice arise whenever persons and polities cannot have it all, whenever they must choose between competing “goods,” positive or negative.
• Different types of justice arise because persons and polities have to make constrained choices between different types of goods—with distributive justice, they allocate scarce material goods and benefits among many claimants; with social justice, they reconcile conflicting rights and responsibilities; with retributive justice, they determine sanctions and punishments; and with formative justice, they channel effort to pursuing particular possibilities out of the many open to them.
• Problems of formative justice arise because persons and polities always face the future and find more potentialities unfolding before them than they have the energy, time, ability, and wherewithal to fulfill. They must choose among their purposes and allocate effort and attention to pursuing their potentials. In doing so, they form their unfolding lives.
• Conceptions of formative justice concern principles with which persons and polities choose their controlling aspirations and allocate effort towards their fulfillment.
• Formative justice is difficult because persons and polities always face an indeterminate future, one fraught with uncertainties. In the face of indeterminacy, they must irrevocably make their formative choices, hoping these will prove both successful and sustainable.
• Formative justice is important because persons and polities will suffer or enjoy, as the case may be, the capacities for feeling, thought, and action by which they live.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
1.
AdamsJ. (1841). [Letter 178 to Abigail Adams, undated]. In AdamsC. F. (Ed.), Letters of John Adams, addressed to his wife (Vol. 2, pp. 66–68). Boston, MA: Charles C. Little and James Brown.
2.
BenigerJ. R. (1986). The control revolution: Technological and economic origins of the information society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
BrunnerO., ConzeW., & KoselleckR. (Eds.). (1972-1997). Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-socialen Sprache in Deutschland [Historical basic concepts: Historical dictionary of political and social language in Germany] (Vols. 1–8). Stuttgart, Germany: Klett-Cotta.
5.
BushwayS., StollM. A., & WeimanD. F. (2007). Barriers to reentry? The labor market for released prisoners in post-industrial America. New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation.
6.
CassirerE. (1946). The myth of the state. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
7.
DiltheyW. (1989). Introduction to the human sciences. MakkreelR. A., & RodiF. (Eds.). Princeton: Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1883)
8.
DonaldM. (2001). A mind so rare: The evolution of human consciousness. New York, NY: W. W. Norton.
9.
GarnerB. A. (2009). Garner's modern American usage (3rd ed.). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
10.
GuthrieW. K. C. (1962). A history of Greek philosophy: Vol. 1. The earlier Presocratics and Pythagoreans. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
11.
GuthrieW. K. C. (1965). A history of Greek philosophy: Vol. 2. The Presocratic tradition from Parmenides to Democritus (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
12.
Hampsher-MonkI., TilmansK., & van VreeF. (Eds.). (1998). History of concepts: Comparative perspectives. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Amsterdam University Press.
13.
HavelockE. A. (1957). The liberal temper in Greek politics. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
14.
HavelockE. A. (1963). Preface to Plato. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
15.
HavelockE. A. (1978). The Greek concept of justice from its shadow in Homer to its substance in Plato. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
16.
HebbD. O. (2002). The organization of behavior: A neuropsychological theory. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. (Original work published 1949)
17.
IrwinT. (1988). Aristotle's first principles. Oxford, UK: Clarendon.
18.
JeffersonT. (2008-2016). [Letter to George Wythe dated August 13, 1786]. In J. P. McClure & J. J. Looney (Eds.), The Papers of Thomas Jefferson Digital Edition (Main Series, Vol. 10). Retrieved from http://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/founders/TSJN-01-10-02-0162
19.
JeffersonT. (1930). [Letter to Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours dated April 24, 1816]. In MaloneD. (Ed.), Correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours, 1789–1817 (pp. 181—187). Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.
KaufmannW. (1959). From Shakespeare to existentialism: Studies in poetry, religion, and philosophy. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
24.
KirkG. S., RavenJ. E., & SchofieldM. (Eds.). (1983). The Presocratic philosophers: A critical history with a selection of texts (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
25.
KoselleckR. (2002). The practice of conceptual history: Timing history, spacing concepts (PresnerT. S., Trans.). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
McClintockR. (2005). Homeless in the house of intellect: Formative justice and education as an academic study. New York, NY: Laboratory for Liberal Learning,
32.
McClintockR. (2012). Enough: A pedagogic speculation. New York, NY: The Reflective Commons.
33.
National Commission on Excellence in Education. (1983, April). A nation at risk: The imperative for educational reform. Washington, DC: Author.
34.
NussbaumM. C. (2006). Frontiers of justice: Disability, nationality, species membership. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
35.
NussbaumM. C., & SenA. (Eds.). (1993). The quality of life. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
36.
Ortega y GassetJ. (1962). Obras completas de José Ortega y Gasset [Complete works of José Ortega y Gasset]: Vol. 9. Una interpretación de la historia universal [An interpretation of universal history]. GaragorriP. (Ed.). Madrid, Spain: Revista de Occidente.
37.
PopperK. R. (1950). The open society and its enemies. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
38.
RawlsJ. (1999). A theory of justice (Rev. ed.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
39.
RichterM. (1995). The history of political and social concepts: A critical introduction. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
40.
RilkeR. M. (1954). Letters to a young poet (Rev. ed.; Herter NortonM. D., Trans.). New York, NY: W. W. Norton.
41.
RossE. A. (1906). Social control: A survey of the foundations of order. New York, NY: Macmillan.
42.
RussellB. (1945). A history of Western philosophy and its connection with political and social circumstances from the earliest times to the present day. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster.
43.
SenA. (1999). Development as freedom. New York, NY: Anchor.
44.
SenA. (2009). The idea of justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
SmithL. B., & ThelenE. (Eds.). (1993). A dynamic systems approach to development: Applications. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
48.
SnellB. (1960). The discovery of mind: The Greek origins of European thought (RosenmeyerT. G., Trans.). New York, NY: Harper Torchbooks. (Original work published 1946)
49.
WeberM. (1968). Economy and society: An outline of interpretive sociology (Vol. 1). RothG., & WittichC. (Eds.). Berkeley: University of California Press.
50.
WesternB. (2006). Punishment and inequality in America. New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation.
51.
WheelwrightP. (1964). Heraclitus. New York, NY: Atheneum.
