Vol. 22, No. 2 (1995)

This special issue of Social Justice was conceptualized during the early debates about the likely impact of the Clinton administration on justice in the United States. Our plan was to assemble articles that would assess what was happening in various public policy areas under the leadership of the Clinton administration and that would speculate on at least the near-term trajectory for social justice in the United States.

The issue is divided into three sections. The first addresses "The Social Philosophy of Punishment," the second "Access and Openness," and the third, "Crime and Justice." The first section opens with an important article on how we can think about human relations and human responsibility. In this article, James F. Doyle presents a radical philosophical critique of punishment. He draws a contrast between the "ethics of obligation" and the "ethics of social relations" as radically different normative approaches to law and criminal punishment. As Doyle makes clear, the ethics of obligation informs current criminal justice punishment strategies, while the ethics of social relations, based on a more social and contextual view of how people are related to each other, offers a strong challenge to these practices. Doyle also demonstrates that the Clinton administration continues to operate almost exclusively under the ethics of obligation. Though Doyle's argument focuses on punishment, it opens up a broader horizon about how we can think about social justice in all aspects of human relations.