Abstract
The inverted title of this essay calls for an immediate explanation: Why does it put unfairness ahead of fairness? My main reason for this seeming paradox is that the experience of unfairness is a much more striking and stinging phenomenon than that of fairness, to which we respond much more calmly and unemotionally. Already Schopenhauer had asserted the priority of injustice (Unrecht) over justice (Recht).216 More recently Edmond Cahn has made this observation the starting point for his stimulating book-size study of The Sense of Injustice.217
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Notes
Edmond Cahn, The Sense of Injustice, New York: New York University Press, 1949.
This phrase in two different meanings is also used and discussed by Joel Feinberg in his ‘Non-comparative Justice’ (Philosophic Review 83 (1974), p. 308, note 7).
Brian Barry, Political Argument, London: Kegan-Paul, 1965.
See J.L. Austin, Philosophical Papers, Oxford, 1962, p. 130; see also my The Context of the Phenomenological Movement, The Hague, 1981, p. 89.
Joel Feinberg, ‘Non-comparative Justice’, Philosophical Review 83 (1974), pp. 297–338.
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© 1986 Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, Dordrecht
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Spiegelberg, H. (1986). Unfairness and Fairness: A Phenomenological Analysis. In: Steppingstones Toward an Ethics for Fellow Existers. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-4337-7_17
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-4337-7_17
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