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Can Justice Survive the Social Sciences?
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17881 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
3 / 1990 |
5,212 Words |
| Author
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Daniel N. Robinson
Daniel N. Robinson is chairman of the Department of
Psychology at Georgetown University. His latest book is
Aristotle's Psychology (Columbia University Press, 1989). |
The folk psychology of an age is usually concealed, if not depreciated, in the works of its philosophical luminaries. It is doubtful, to say the least, that contemporaries of Aristotle, Descartes, Locke, or Freud would share or even understand the concepts of human nature these celebrated theorists developed. The folk psychology of an age is far more likely to be discovered in public institutions than in private studies, and it is perhaps nowhere more visible than in the institutions of justice.
In every civilized age, the law must make daily and intelligible contact with the reasonings, perceptions, and passions of the ordinary citizen, accordingly, the legal view of human nature an the determinants of conduct provides one of the most useful, and even truthful, insights into those commonsense notions that animate the convictions of an age. Something of a history of folk psychology can be gleaned, therefore, from an in close the settled positions reached on human nature.
About a decade ago, I employed the little of this essay as the subtitle of a book summarizing just such an inquiry: Psychology and Law - Can Justice Survive the Social Sciences? (Oxford, 1980). Then as now, the question was intended to be neither argumentative nor controversial. Rather, it arose from a historically illuminating recognition of two clearly different perspectives: jural science and social science. Finding them to be entirely incompatible and grounded in fundamentally different principles and understandings, I was led to the conclusion that at least one durable and precious conception of justice could not survive the social sciences. I am ever more confident in this conclusion now that the psychosocial perspective has become more influential within the jural arena. Indeed, as the psychosocial perspective takes on the features of a relic, useful for educational or devotional purposes but having only a small and shrinking part to play in the serious and realistic business of adjudication. To a worrisome extent, the perspective that was for centuries synonymous with justice itself now tends to be taken as a merely academic chapter in the philosophy of law or, what is worse, moral philosophy.
Cosmology and law
As a creation of Western civilization, the jural perspective is ancient, but it is neither innocent nor simplistic. It is the product of an intelligence refined at once by an abstract cosmology and a naturalistic anthropology. In its earliest, manifestation, it is indebted to those Homeric myths and sagas that tie the fortunes of earthly life
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