Two Faces of Justice: A Milestone in Quantitative Cross-Cultural Research

Abstract

Everyday Justice: Responsibility and the Individual in Japan and the United States. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992. Pp. 290. $35.00.Few matters dominate our everyday discussions as much as the subject of injustice. Daily we suffer and commit manifold injustices, real or imagined, and if we are not engaging others in conversation about the injustices we ourselves have experienced, we are being told about those in others' lives. Judged by how much of our attention it occupi?s, injustice is indeed "the most ordinary of our ordinary vices."' So we begin with a commonplace: Injustice concerns us. When wronged or harmed, we seek justice, and our search usually involves two related pursuits: establishing who is responsible for what happened, and sanctioning the responsible party. Left as it is, however, this general truth hides much interesting variation, for people of the world perceive harms, locate responsibility, and punish offenders in decidedly different ways. Hamilton and Sanders's Everyday Justice describes, explains, and compares how Americans and Japanese think about these tasks and thus uncovers some of the fascinating variation that lies hidden behind the universal urge to do justice. In the process the book also develops a theory of responsibility allocation that should greatly aid future researchers in their efforts to uncover still more of that legal-cultural variety.As their title suggests, Hamilton and Sanders concentrate on the judgments of ordinary citizens, focusing especially on their assessments of responsibility and sanctions-on what they believe makes a wrongful act wrong, and on what they think should then be done about it. Thus, the core concepts in the book are responsibility and punishment, and the authors argue that together they form "the heart of a society's legal culture" (at 12). The central belief guiding their study is that when people make judgments about responsibility and punishment, they consider both deeds, or what a person does, and roles, or what a person is obliged to do (at 18-19, 75, 84, 86, 129).Their most general comparative finding leans heavily on this distinction, for Hamilton and Sanders discover that Japanese judgments of wrongdoing make greater use of information about the roles of actors and victims while American judgments attend more to deeds, especially the actor's mental state at the time of the offense (at 86-87).Hamilton and Sanders's purpose is to show how concrete social factsthat is, differences in social structure or in the distribution of social tiescan be used to explain how both individuals and nations come to differently judge wrongdoing (at 3, 202). Thus, they aim to build a theory that can account for both micro-and macro-level variation in norms about responsibility and punishment (at 12, 75).The theory they construct posits that judgments of responsibility and punishment "grow out of the way people behave toward each other" and hence depend both on "the nature of relationships in a society" and on "how a culture envisions its actors, ...