An Analysis of Empirical Research on the Scope of Justice

Abstract

The scope of justice has been defined as the boundary within which justice is perceived to be relevant. The empirical literature on this topic is primarily aimed at predicting when a target will be excluded from the scope of justice and at examining potential consequences of exclusion, from accepting a target's suffering to active harm-doing such as mass internment and genocide. The concept of the scope of justice is interesting and heuristically useful, but there are several problems with the empirical literature that impede its progress. For example, the proposed mediator often has not been measured, or operationalizations of the scope of justice have been confounded with other constructs. Also, although the scope of justice remains one possible explanation for results obtained in various experiments, there are equally compelling alternatives that do not implicate exclusion from the scope of justice. We offer suggestions about how to study scope of justice issues in the future and identify points that need to be clarified regarding the conceptualization of the scope of justice.