The Sense of Justice: Biological Foundations of Law

This book introduces the reader to the social and behavioural foundations for a `sense of justice' - the form of equilibrium which individuals and legal systems seek to achieve and maintain in a changing and complex world.

The contributors draw upon new discoveries and insights from the biologically-based behavioural sciences that are critical to a more informed understanding of legal phenomena, particularly those dealing with complex social and political relationships.

The Problem of Justice in Contemporary Legal Thought - Roger D Masters PART ONE: LAW, BIOLOGY, AND THE SENSE OF JUSTICE Moralistic Aggression, Processing Mechanisms, and the Brain - Michael T McGuire The Biological Foundations of the Sense of Justice Emotion and the Costs of Altruism - Robert Frank The Economic Foundations of the Sense of Justice Naturalistic Approaches to Justice in Political Philosophy and the Life Sciences - Roger D Masters PART TWO: LEGAL THEORY, NATURE AND THE SENSE OF JUSTICE An Ethological Perspective on Law and Biology - Margaret Gruter The Sense of Justice and the Concept of Cultural Justice - Wolfgang Fikentscher Legal Anthropology Traditional Legal Concepts from an Evolutionary Perspective - Peter Strahlendorf PART THREE: LEGAL PRACTICE, SOCIAL NORMS, AND THE SENSE OF JUSTICE Intuition, Altruism and Spite - William H Rodgers Jr Justice as Justification Empirical Evidence of the Sense of Justice - Karen Cook and Karen Hegtvedt An Ethological Interpretation of the Sense of Justice on the Basis of German Law - Herbert Helmrich PART FOUR: NATURE, CULTURE, AND THE SENSE OF JUSTICE The Chimpanzee's Sense of Social Regularity and its Relation to the Human Sense of Justice - Frans B M De Waal The Child's Development of the Sense of Justice - William R Charlesworth Moral Development, Resources, and Emotions The Evolution of Cultural Norms - Lionel Tiger Toward a More Coherent Theory of Justice - Roger D Masters (with comments by Robert Cooter and E Donald Elliott)