The Introduction broadly contextualizes how the CCP dealt with historical injustices after Mao Zedong’s death. It provides the necessary framework for understanding the processes and practices that are further explored and examined in the following sections and chapters of the book while shedding light on how selectively applied approaches today associated with the concept of transitional justice may serve to strengthen rather than subvert authoritarian rule. It also highlights the most outstanding features of the CCP’s politics of historical justice before placing these strategies against the backdrop of recent debates on crucial paradigms of transitional justice. Specifically, it introduces two key channels (“property” and “the mechanics of rehabilitation”) through which the government and public sought to concretely redress Mao-era historical injustices and efforts to construct meaningful “truths” of these injustices (“the politics of truth” and “memory”)

Discussion of the confrontation between Socrates and Callicles in the Gorgias has mostly focused on its first two phases: Callicles’ statement of his views and Socrates’ attempted refutations (481–500), and Socrates’ subsequent attempt to substitute his own conception of the good life (501–9). Much less attention has been paid to the final phase (509–22). But Plato stages here the most sustained debate in the dialogue between alternative answers – with their consequences – to what has proved to be its central question: is committing injustice or falling victim to it the greatest evil? This chapter examines the key moves in this debate, in which Callicles is again tempted by Socrates to participate, after previously refusing to continue. I argue that Plato’s aim here is to show just why and how Socrates might successfully initiate and sustain intellectual engagement with an intelligent young politician hoping to rise within the Athenian democracy, such as Callicles is portrayed as being. He fails to persuade him. But this is not, as sometimes supposed, a failure of intellectual communication. It is a matter of what Plato wants us to understand as different fundamental commitments.

The Laws makes clear its commitment to a form of Socratic paradox: no one who is unjust is so voluntarily. I show first how its protagonist – the Athenian Visitor – maintains this position, without resorting to the Socratic thesis that knowingly acting against one's beliefs about what is best is some sort of impossibility, and indeed recognizing the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance. My main concern, however, is with the Athenian's treatment – near the outset of the penology of Book 9 – of what is presented as a serious threat posed by the paradox to any viable theory of criminal behaviour and its punishment; or as he puts it, to the distinction drawn 'in every city and by every legialator there has ever been between two sorts of wrongdoing (adikêmata), voluntary and involuntary'. The Athenian's strategy for resisting the threat (as most commentators note) relies on distinguishing between volutarily harming someone, which requires compensation and often purification, and involuntary commission of injustice, which merits punishment, reconceptualized however as treatment for psychic disease. How far this distinction is successful in defusing the problem is then explored.

The introduction presents an overview of the book’s argument and the theoretical framework that guides the project. It also lays out the contributions the book will make to the historical literature of slave resistance. The argument is that enslaved women resisted slavery with lethal force and when they did so, their own ideas about injustice were a central motivation. A new Black feminist theory is introduced and outlined: the Black feminist practice of justice. The core tenets of this philosophy includes the women prioritizing their perspective and how they defined justice, understanding the stark lack of justice in the judicial system, Black women’s rationality and prior planning, proportionality, a concept of “just deserts,” and their resignation to accept their fates for exercising lethal force.

The conclusion outlines why this book resonates with issues of injustice facing Black women today, particularly sex trafficking survivors.

The selections in this chapter discuss the management of the realm and the importance of specific royal practices. Ensuring the prosperity of the rural and urban populations, the productivity of the land, the proper maintenance of the army and sound financial management feature prominently among the king’s responsibilities. Many mirrors emphasise the necessity of constant royal oversight, particularly of the officials involved in the collection of taxes. Strict and consistent oversight, accompanied by swift dismissal when cases of abuse came to light, were the only measures that would protect the revenue-producing categories on whose labour the entire edifice of government depended. In cases of injustice, it was the ruler’s obligation to provide a means of redress, through the practice of listening to the petitions of his subjects and restoring to them any property that had been wrongfully seized. In many instances, the practices of good governance urged upon the wise and virtuous ruler reflect the principle of maṣlaḥa, the common good. The texts are drawn from al-Māwardī, Tashīl al-naẓar wa-taʿjīl al-ẓafar; Niẓām al-Mulk, Siyar al-mulūk; and al-Ṭurṭūshī, Sirāj al-mulūk.

The chapter questions whether Tolstoy’s ideology was weakening the legitimacy of imperial legality. Beginning with an overview of the state of Russia’s legal system, the chapter examines Tolstoy’s first encounters with the law as a student at Kazan University, his evaluation of public access to justice after the liberal reforms of the 1860s to 1870s, and his ideas of rule of law in general. Disappointed in law as a field of independent expertise, Tolstoy became more interested in true power, which he believed one could find in oneself by understanding the purpose of life. In order to obtain this power, he turned to literature, which he found to be much stronger than law. In his writing he could criticize both the social and political systems in which people participated and the way they had been conditioned not to recognize the horrors of these systems. The most disturbing example Tolstoy witnessed personally was people being forced to serve in the army during war and told that it was their sacred duty to kill. Believing, like his hero Jean-Jacques Rousseau, that the conditions of society corrupt people’s natural goodness, Tolstoy made it his mission to save people from such false ideas and actions being legally and socially imposed upon them.

In the Hippias Minor, Socrates argues that the expert in a given domain is the one in a position to voluntarily violate the rules of that domain. For example, the expert archer can ensure that her arrows miss the target, whereas the novice archer might accidentally hit the target she’s trying to miss. Socrates claims, shockingly, that this point holds for justice as well: it is the expert in justice who will have the power to deliberately act unjustly. Though some accuse Socrates of drawing this conclusion on the basis of uncritical reliance on the craft analogy, I argue that in fact Socrates is identifying common ground between a variety of forms of practical normativity. In any activity that can be assessable as going well or badly, those who intentionally flout the norm, by erring on purpose, are better at it than those who unintentially flub the norm, by erring accidentally. Socrates’ argument places powerrather than the exercise of powerat the heart of ethics. The Hippias Minor shows why Socratic ethics is an ethics of virtue, rather than an ethics of virtue activation.

“It is common knowledge that psychosis and schizophrenia-spectrum disorders are often associated with disability and suffering. What is less commonly known is the ample evidence for recovery. Images of disability and dangerousness are visible in our society and media, but we don’t see the millions of people who have lived well with or despite psychosis. For many Americans who experience psychosis, medication and risk management remain the focus of treatment despite the long history of effective psychosocial treatments for psychosis. Mental health stigma endures, both in society and as reflected in poor funding, workforce development, and implementation. This limits research, services available, and dissemination of proven interventions, even when they have empirical support and result in long-term cost savings. Mental health professionals can, and should, play a central role in supporting recovery for people with psychosis, changing harmful messages and stigma, and in advocating for the dissemination and availability of psychosocial interventions for psychosis. This chapter emphasizes historical, current, and intersectional perspectives and challenges to three factors we believe are essential to changing our system: 1. genuine hope; 2. available effective psychosocial interventions; and 3. changing attitudes to support dignity and autonomy.”

In Chapter 3, I discuss scientific instrumentalism, or the notion that scientific findings are morally neutral and that scientific activities are justified primarily in terms of their pragmatic utility. I argue that an instrumentalist approach to psychology disguises the moral and political agendas of those who deploy psychological research, conflating these with a neutralist account of “what works.” I provide a broad historical sketch of those for whom psychology has worked – primarily, large institutions – and of those for whom psychology has not worked – principally, those in disenfranchised social positions. I detail some of the most egregious examples of harm, exploitation, and injustice in the history of psychology, providing a general analysis of the ways that psychologists have encoded racism, sexism, and other forms of prejudice under seemingly neutral categories like intelligence. Concluding Part I, I outline how scientism, objectivism, and instrumentalism combine to undermine the moral responsiveness of psychology.

Chapter 6 turns to rules of assertion on the hearer side. One of the central aims of this chapter is to argue for one specific such rule which requires hearers believe what is asserted. We argue that in order to make proper sense of testimonial injustice, we must countenance a duty to believe on the part of the hearer. Having looked at some proposals that emerge from recent literature on conversational pressure and found them wanting, we offer a functionalist account of this duty to belief.

This chapter discusses how pedagogically productive is the idea of invoking in classrooms feelings of collective guilt, and attempts to explore not only the persistence of ‘collective guilt’ in students’ responses, but also the new possibilities that are opened with reframing it as ‘shared responsibility’. In particular, the analysis addresses the moral, political and pedagogical implications of viewing the phenomena of collective guilt and shared responsibility through the lenses of Hannah Arendt and Iris Marion Young. Using Arendt’s and Young’s accounts of shared responsibility offers opportunities to educators and students to make them aware of their responsibilities as members of certain social groups, rather than getting stuck in feelings of guilt. The proposed pedagogy of shared responsibility is not focused on blame, guilt or fault, but rather it has the potential to minimize denials of complicity and instead encourage students to interrogate the conditions under which they are responsive and responsible to others.

Political theorists and social scientists alike agree that passions matter for politics, but disagree about which passions matter most and how they contribute to political flourishing. I make the case that resentment, contrary to its traditional associations with violence and injustice, in fact makes us alive to the suffering of others and leads us to aid them in seeking restitution. When we adopt the resentments of others by sympathizing with them, we implicitly recognize their equal moral and political status, too, key commitments of liberalism. I argue that liberals of all stripes should embrace sympathetic resentment as a proper moral motive for justice.

Like his predecessors, Adam Smith saw the value of resentment as a motive for justice and an emotion that best captured our belief in the equality of others, but he offered the most comprehensive account of how the passion of resentment might be made into a moral (or proper) passion. Through his innovative impartial spectator theory, which explains how–and why–individuals refine their own emotions and learn to better recognize the emotions of many, varied others, Smith developed a theory of justice based on spectatorial resentment that avoided the pitfalls of partiality and while leveraging resentment's potency as a motive and intimate connection to injustice. More than any other thinker, Smith was also attuned to the psychological toll that the refinement of spectatorial resentment imposed on victims and spectators of injustice alike, however, casting his social and political theory in a somewhat tragic light. Smith thus offers a therapeutic view of religious belief as one means available to liberal citizens who must cope with lingering resentment in an unjust world.

Chapter 8 examines legal actions brought against predatory subprime lenders and servicers. It briefly summarizes the results of allegations of fraud and violation of various federal and state securities and financial services law. This chapter also provides contextual analysis relating to claims brought against lenders under anti-discrimination law. The chapter commences with a brief overview of the types of settlements negotiated, and then turns to the specific financial firms that issued or serviced predatory mortgages and residential mortgage-backed securities. It unpacks, to the extent that public disclosures have allowed us to research, how the money, intended in part for consumers, is actually used. The chapter analyzes how the money from the settlements could have been more equitably distributed, and could have offered different signals to the mortgage industry going forward in such a way as to prevent the most recent forms of predatory lending. For the most part, investors in these banks, brokerage and servicing firms appear to have recouped a sizable amount of their losses. Consumer borrowers are not as fortunate.

Some might question the rationale for including liberation theology in this book. It is rarely discussed in international relations, most scholars having left it to the subfield of comparative politics. Even there, it has played a subservient role in studies of democratic change in Latin America.1 As a movement of church renewal, its growth has been far surpassed by Pentecostalism and charismatic Catholicism since the 1980s.2