Social Injustice

The idea of social injustice is pivotal to much contemporary moral and political philosophy, and yet this concept has repeatedly failed to attract the detailed analysis it deserves. How could so much be written about social justice, and so little about social injustice? The essays in this book are an attempt to rebalance this anomaly.

The first chapter in this book provides a comprehensive and engaging account of the idea of social injustice. It is argued in the chapter that there are three dimensions to social injustice: misdistribution, exclusion, and disempowerment. Building on this initial analysis of social injustice, the other chapters in this book cover a range of different themes including distributive justice, exploitation, torture, moral motivations, democratic theory, voting behaviour, and market socialism.

Dr. Vittorio Bufacchi is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at University College Cork. He is the author of Violence and Social Justice (Palgrave), editor of Violence: A Philosophical Anthology (Palgrave) and Rethinking Violence (Routledge), and guest editor for a special issue on 'Philosophy and Violence', Revue Internationale de Philosophie, No.3, 2013. He is also editor of the Palgrave Philosophy Today book series, and is currently working on a book on human rights.

Preface and Acknowledgements
1. Making Sense of Social Injustice
2. Why Political Philosophy Matters: The Imperative of Social Injustice
3. Studying Social Injustice: The Methodology of Empirical Philosophy
4. The Injustice of Exploitation
5. Torture, Terrorism and the State: A Refutation of the Ticking-Bomb Argument (with Jean Maria Arrigo)
6. The Enlightenment, Contractualism, and the Moral Polity
7. Motivating Justice
8. Justice, Equality, Liberty
9. Sceptical Democracy
10. Political Scepticism: A Reply to the Critics
11. Voting, Rationality and Reputation
12. Deliberative Democracy in Action
13. Socialism in the 21st century: Liberal, Democratic, and Market-Oriented
Bibliography
Index