Procedural Justice and Relational Theory

Front matter

Routledge Research in Legal Philosophy

PROCEDURAL JUSTICE AND

RELATIONAL THEORY

PART I Procedural justice in policing, courts, and prisons: Empirical reviews

1 The empirical study of procedural justice policing in Australia: Highlights and challenges KRISTINA MURPHY

2 Procedural fairness and jury satisfaction: An analysis of relational dimensions JANE GOODMAN-DELAHUNTY, DAVID TAIT, AND NATALIE MARTSCHUK

3 Procedural justice in corrections JULIE BARKWORTH

PART II Procedural justice and legitimacy: Empirical and normative perspectives

4 Procedural justice, legitimacy, and social contexts ANTHONY BOTTOMS AND JUSTICE TANKEBE vii vl Contents

5 Procedure—content interaction in attitudes to law and in the value of the rule of law: An empirical and philosophical collaboration NOAM GUR AND JONATHAN JACKSON

6 Legal legitimacy and the relevance of participatory procedures SARAH SORIAL

PART III The concept of procedural justice: Philosophical perspectives

7 The inadequacy of instrumentalist theories of procedural justice DENISE MEYERSON

8 The many facets of procedural justice in legal proceedings EMANUELA CEVA

9 Procedural justice, relational equality, and self-respect CATRIONA MACKENZIE

PART IV Implications and applications: Legal institutions and the exercise of legal authority

10 Racial profiling as pejorative discrimination NATALIE STOLJAR

11 Administrative discretion and governing relationships: Situating procedural fairness KRISTEN RUNDLE

12 The framing of tribunal procedures: A question of balance or a participation-centred approach?

‘THERESE MACDERMOTT

Index

Contributors

Julie Barkworth is a Lecturer in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice and Griffith Criminology Institute at Griffith University. She has research interests in procedural justice, cooperation and compliance behaviour, defiance and resistance to authority, policing, policing vulnerability, corrections, and prisoner well-being.

Anthony Bottoms is Emeritus Wolfson Professor of Criminology at the University of Cambridge and Honorary Professor of Criminology at the University of Sheffield. He is also a Fellow of the British Academy.

Emanuela Ceva is Professor of Political Theory at the University of Geneva. She works on conflict and justice, democracy, and corruption.

Jane Goodman-Delahunty is Professor of Forensic and Legal Psychology at Charles Sturt University and a Member of the New South Wales Civil and Administrative Tribunal. Her empirical legal studies foster evidence-based decisions to promote social, procedural, and distributive justice.

Noam Gur is a Senior Lecturer in Law and Co-Director of the Centre for Law and Society in a Global Context at Queen Mary University of London. He specialises in jurisprudence and has further research interests in political theory and in tort law.

Jonathan Jackson is a Professor of Research Methodology at the London School of Economics and an Honorary Professor at the University of Sydney Law School. He is a criminologist working at the intersection of psychology and law.

Therese MacDermott is a Professor at Macquarie Law School, with research interests in the areas of dispute resolution, employment rights, equality, and anti-discrimination law. Her professional engagement with legal practice and tribunal processes has facilitated the focus of her research on evaluating the utility and accessibility of statutory rights.

viii Contributors

Catriona Mackenzie is a Distinguished Professor in Philosophy at Macquarie University and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities. Her research interests lie at the intersection of ethics, applied ethics, moral psychology, and feminist philosophy.

Natalie Martschuk is a Research Associate at Charles Sturt University, Australia. Her research focuses on effectiveness of interviewing strategies, procedural justice, decision- making, and witness reliability and credibility. Previously, she practiced as a psychologist at the State Hospital for Forensic Psychiatry (Stendal, Germany).

Denise Meyerson is a Professor of Law at the Macquarie Law School, Macquarie University, and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Law. Her research interests lie at the intersection of human rights law, legal philosophy, and political philosophy.

Kristina Murphy is a Professor of Criminology and an Australian Research Council Future Fellow at the Griffith Criminology Institute, Griffith University. Her current research projects explore the importance of procedural justice in the context of policing crime victims, and immigrant, ethnic minority, and Muslim communities in Australia. Her focus is on how procedural justice in policing can improve police-community relations.

Kristen Rundle is a Professor and Co-Director of the Centre for Comparative Constitutional Studies at Melbourne Law School. She teaches and researches in the fields of legal theory and administrative law.

Natalie Stoljar is an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at McGill University. Her research is principally in three areas: feminist philosophy, social and political philosophy, and the philosophy of law.

Sarah Sorial is an Associate Professor in Law at Macquarie University. Her research is primarily at the intersection of philosophy and law, with a specific focus on the limits of free speech, the importance of democratic deliberation, and the place of rights in liberal democracies.

David Tait is Professor of Justice Research at Western Sydney University. He has led four Australian Research Council funded research projects about court environments, technologies, and processes and is currently developing immersive virtual courts.

Justice Tankebe is a Lecturer in Criminology at the University of Cambridge. His research interests are in policing and illegitimacy, procedural and distributive injustice, institutional distrust, corruption, and vigilantism.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the contributors to this volume whose enthusiasm for this project and hard work made it possible. Wendy Carlton provided outstanding editorial assistance. Her eagle eye for detail in matters of consistency, referencing, style, and formatting made the task of the editors immeasurably easier. We are also grateful to Alison Kirk, our editor at Routledge, for her encouragement and friendly support throughout this project. The editors’ research for this volume was funded by the Australian Government through the Australian Research Council’s Discovery Project funding scheme (DP1701009600: ‘A Relational Theory of Procedural Justice’). We are very grateful to the Australian Research Council for its support. The origins of the volume lie in a workshop funded by the Australian Research Council and the Macquarie University Research Centre for Agency, Values and Ethics. This workshop, which was held at Macquarie University in September 2018, brought together moral and legal philosophers, lawyers, social psychologists and criminologists to explore the topic of procedural justice. Earlier versions of some of the chapters in this volume were presented at the workshop and the productive discussion among the participants greatly enriched the final product. Each of us would also like to acknowledge the time and commitment our fellow editors put into bringing this project to fruition. Denise Meyerson, Macquarie University, Sydney Catriona Mackenzie, Macquarie University, Sydney Therese MacDermott, Macquarie University, Sydney April 2020

Introduction

Procedural justice in law, psychology, and philosophy

Denise Meyerson, Catriona Mackenzie, and Therese MacDermott

What procedures should officials use as a matter of justice when they apply and enforce the law or exercise discretion vested in them by the law?? This is an important question of political morality, since procedurally just treatment at the hands of officials is a precondition for the justifiable exercise of state power. Yet legal theorists and philosophers have paid surprisingly little attention to addressing this question. This contrasts with the extensive philosophical literature exploring substantive forms of justice, such as distributive justice and rectificatory justice (Bayles 1990, p. 1), and with the recognition of the importance of procedures in other areas of philosophical inquiry, such as meta-ethics and political philosophy (e.g. in the field of democratic theory). The philosophical neglect of procedural justice is all the more striking in light of the attention the concept has attracted in other disciplines. Social psychologists in particular have undertaken extensive empirical research on procedural justice in legal, policing, and organisational contexts. A central finding of this research is that people care as much about procedures as about outcomes, and that their understanding of procedural justice is shaped by relational factors, such as the attitudes expressed by authorities in interacting with them. The premise of this volume is that the empirical research into the psychology of procedural justice is significant. However, this research needs to be complemented by normative theorising that explains the moral significance of procedures and makes normative sense of people’s concerns about relational factors.

This volume contributes to the field of applied legal philosophy by initiating an interdisciplinary exchange between moral philosophers, lawyers, legal theorists, psychologists, and criminologists on the topic of procedural justice in legal contexts. In particular, given the importance of relational factors according to the research in social psychology, a central focus of the volume is to investigate procedural justice from the perspective of relational theories of ethics and justice, and to explore the implications of this perspective for the design of legal procedures.

One of the challenges posed by interdisciplinary exchange of this kind is that scholars from different disciplines can use the same concepts with subtly or sometimes substantially different meanings, leading to misunderstanding and miscommunication. One of our aims in this introduction is to try to avert potential misunderstandings by explaining some differences between the way lawyers, legal theorists, social psychologists, and philosophers understand certain key concepts. In Section 2, we provide an overview of some key concepts and relevant background literature on procedural justice in law, legal theory, social psychology, and philosophy. In Section 3, we provide a brief overview of the structure of the volume and summarise the contents of each chapter.

0.2 Key concepts for understanding procedural justice

Procedural justice is, of course, a central legal concept (usually under the name of ‘procedural fairness’, ‘natural justice’ or ‘procedural due process’, depending on the jurisdiction).* However, this volume is not centrally concerned with the law’s approach to procedural justice as a doctrinal matter (the analysis of legal concepts, rules, and practices). Instead, it approaches procedural justice from a more critical, normative perspective.

As an example of the law’s approach, consider the hearing rule, which is one of the two classic rules of procedural fairness recognised by the common law, the other being the rule against bias. The hearing rule imposes a legal obligation on certain decision-makers (whether in the exercise of judicial or administrative power) to give individuals a ‘fair opportunity’ to advance their case. Doctrinal treatments of the rule are concerned mainly with determining to which decisions and decision-makers the rule applies and analysing its content when it does apply. Since the rule applies in the majority of cases, the latter tends to be the ‘real and practical question’ (Galligan 1996, p. 358). The key consideration here is that the hearing rule is very generally framed, and the courts have emphasised that its content is flexible, saying that its requirements are more or less stringent, depending on the circumstances of the particular case. Thus, the rule has a ‘chameleon-like’ nature (Kioa v West (1985) 159 CLR 550, 612). For instance, the courts have held that fairness to affected persons sometimes requires a full-blown oral hearing with legal representation (e.g. in the circumstances of a criminal trial), but that in other circumstances (e.g. high-volume administrative matters, such as the refusal of a licence renewal), a pared-back hearing based solely on written submissions will suffice. From the doctrinal perspective, then, the focus is on close, particularised analysis of whether a person has had an adequate opportunity to be involved in the decision-making process in light of all the surrounding circumstances. By contrast, deeper moral questions about the justifiability of the hearing rule are of less interest. As DJ Galligan says, ‘the courts tend not to enter into direct discussion of why the hearing principle is a fundamental requirement of procedural fairness’ (1996, p. 354). Instead, the reason for this is often taken to be self-evident, as in Justice Fortescue’s frequently quoted statement in Dr Bentley’s Case that ‘God himself would not condemn Adam for his transgression until he had called him to know what he could say in his defence ... Such proceeding is agreeable to justice’ (The King v Chancellor of Cambridge (1723) 1 Str 557, 2 Ld Raym 1334, 8 Mod 148, 164).

By contrast, a normative approach is in search of the most defensible theory of procedural justice from a philosophical point of view. Such a theory answers deeper moral questions about the procedures that officials should use when they apply the law, enforce the law, or make discretionary decisions, and it also suggests ways in which procedural rules and practices should be reformed if they diverge from the relevant normative standards. For instance, while it is no doubt more ‘agreeable to justice’ to determine questions of guilt and innocence by allowing accused persons to defend themselves as opposed to, say, tossing a coin, a normative theory will ask why this is the case. Is it, for instance, because a hearing makes it more likely that the rules of the criminal law will be accurately applied? Or does a hearing also serve non-instrumental values and, if so, what form do they take? Consider also the problem of bias. What sort of bias is offensive to procedural justice? Personal bias is obviously a breach of procedural justice, but what should we say about more insidious, systemic forms of bias in, for instance, bureaucracies and the police force (see Galligan 1996, pp. 438-439)? Why, for example, is it morally problematic if government officials treat welfare recipients with disrespect or operate with the assumption that they are undeserving? Or, as Natalie Stoljar asks in her contribution to this volume, why might the use of racial profiling by police be inherently morally problematic? A normative theory of procedural justice is necessary to answer these questions.

To the extent that legal theorists and philosophers have sought to develop normative theories of procedural justice, the literature is dominated by instrumental and dignitarian accounts. Instrumental accounts take the outcomes-oriented view that the only purpose of procedures is to lead to outcomes that uphold substantive legal rights. Ronald Dworkin is an influential defender of the instrumentalist view, as is John Rawls. Dworkin believes that people who are mistakenly denied their legal rights suffer injustice or ‘moral harm’ (1985, p. 80) and that procedural justice consists in the use of procedures that guard against this form of injustice. Dworkin makes clear that he believes that there is no moral harm other than the harm of a mistaken decision (pp. 102-103). This implies that the only reason to insist on a procedure such as a hearing is if it guards against legal error. Rawls takes a related view, saying that procedural justice in criminal trials consists in the use of procedures that lead to the correct result most of the time (1971, p. 86), and that due process is ‘a process reasonably designed to ascertain the truth’ (1971, p. 239). Richard Posner’s economic approach to procedural justice (1973) is also a form of instrumentalism, although, unlike Dworkin and Rawls, Posner does not regard the erroneous deprivation of legal rights as a form of injustice to individuals. Instead, he is concerned only about the fact that legal error makes it more difficult to achieve the aims of the substantive law. This is a social cost, not a moral cost. Furthermore, since accurate procedures are expensive and therefore have their own social cost, Posner is willing to trade off the social benefits of accuracy-promoting procedures against their costs. In this volume, Emanuela Ceva, Denise Meyerson, and Kristen Rundle develop critiques of instrumental accounts.

By contrast with instrumentalists, dignitarians such as Antony Duff and Jeremy Waldron maintain that certain procedures have an inherent value that is independent of any contribution they make to arriving at legally correct outcomes. They argue that this independent ‘process value’ is the value of respect for dignity in the Kantian sense of rational agency. In their view, procedural justice requires respect for people as active subjects, not passive objects—ends, not means. This involves respecting them as people who can reason and explain themselves (Duff et al. 2007; Waldron 2011). Thus, dignitarians argue that denying defendants a hearing would fail to respect their rational agency and be unjust in itself, even when their guilt is certain, and an accurate verdict can be arrived at without their participation.

One of the aims of this volume is to present an alternative to instrumentalist and dignitarian accounts of procedural justice. This alternative, relational account is inspired by both relational theory in ethics and political philosophy and by relational accounts of procedural justice in social psychology and criminology. Relational theory is informed by feminist critique of the excessively individualistic and rationalistic focus of much contemporary ethics and philosophy (see, e.g., Mackenzie & Stoljar 2000). In contrast to dominant assumptions of atomistic individualism and rationalism, relational theorists maintain that ethics and political philosophy should pay more attention to the relational dimensions of human agency and identity. This includes attending to the social, embodied, and emotional dimensions of human agency, as well as taking seriously the ways that our individual identities are constituted by our interpersonal, familial, and social relationships, by our social group memberships, and by enculturation into specific linguistic and political communities. Relational theory also draws attention to the impact of unjust social hierarchies on individual agency and identity. Applied to the context of procedural justice, while a relational account agrees with the dignitarians about the importance of respect, it rejects their emphasis on rational agency, arguing for an expanded conception of agency as social, embodied, and emotional as well as rational. It also highlights the critical role of social relationships in fostering respect and self-respect, and the ways in which these attitudes can be undermined by social injustice, oppression, and inequality.

As far as the empirical research on procedural justice undertaken by social psychologists is concerned, some key aspects are worth highlighting. One of the significant findings is that processes matter to people. In fact, the experience of having been treated fairly can be as important as outcome favourability (whether the outcome leads to personal gain) and outcome fairness (whether the outcome is deserved). This proposition, described as ‘counter-intuitive’ by Steven Blader and Tom Tyler (2003, p. 747), has been widely confirmed in a range of empirical studies. It is not that people are happy to lose, but they are more likely to be willing to accept such a loss if they feel they were treated fairly (Tyler 2007, p. 26). Second, people do not typically associate procedural justice with procedures that maximise their chances of achieving a desired outcome. Instead, they interpret procedures as conveying information about their relationship with authorities, and they understand procedural justice in terms of relational criteria. Four factors in particular are central to people’s assessments of procedural fairness:

respect, trustworthiness, neutrality, and voice (Tyler 2007, p. 30). Respect refers to people’s sense that they have been treated with respect and dignity in their interactions with authorities and in the context of decision-making processes. Trustworthiness refers to people’s assessments of whether or not authorities can be trusted to behave fairly towards them, both in the context of a particular decision-making process and in future interactions with them or members of their social group. Neutrality refers to people’s assessments of whether authorities are impartial and even-handed in their dealings with them, rather than biased against them for personal reasons or on the basis of group characteristics, such as gender, race, ethnicity, or religion. Voice refers to people’s perceptions that authorities have provided them with opportunities to participate in the decision-making process and to voice their points of view. If people feel that they have been treated with respect by authorities, if they perceive these authorities to be trustworthy and neutral, and if they are given opportunities to participate in the decision-making process, they are more likely to judge that process as fair. Conversely, people are likely to experience a sense of injustice if their treatment fails to satisfy these criteria, even if they accept that the flaws in their treatment made no material difference to the outcome. A final key finding from the empirical studies is that the experience of procedurally just treatment fosters belief in the legitimacy of authorities and promotes law-abiding behaviour (Tyler 2009).

As to why the experience of procedural justice should have such powerful attitudinal and behavioural effects, the most prominent explanation is the group value model originally developed by Tom Tyler and Allan Lind. According to this model, people seek out social group connections and are highly motivated to ‘understand, maintain and improve the social bonds that exist within groups’. Further, ‘people are concerned about their status in groups because high status within a valued group validates their own self-identity’ (Tyler & Lind 1992, p. 141). Procedures come into this picture via the fact that people interpret satisfactory treatment at the hands of group authorities as a sign that they have value and status within their group. The experience of fair treatment therefore validates their self-identity and promotes a sense of self-worth or self-respect (Tyler & Lind 1992, pp. 139-141; Tyler & Blader 2000, pp. 90-92, 171, 185- 187). In short, it is identity processes that drive our interest in procedures and explain why procedural justice fosters belief in the legitimacy of authorities and promotes law-abiding behaviour (Murphy 2017, p. 48). Several chapters in this volume elaborate on these various aspects of the empirical research and further them in the specific contexts of policing (Kristina Murphy), jury reforms and trial innovations (Jane Goodman-Delahunty, David Tait, and Natalie Martschuk), and prisons (Julie Barkworth).

This set of claims is central to what social psychologists refer to as a ‘relational’ model of procedural justice. Relational models are often contrasted with both social exchange and distributive models. Social exchange theories posit self-interest as people’s primary motivation for engaging in social interactions and social relationships, and hence claim that people assess the value of social relationships in terms of the costs and benefits to themselves of those relationships. Applied to the context of procedural justice, social exchange theories hold that people assess decisions and procedures according to the personal outcome favourability or otherwise of those decisions, and the personal transactions costs or benefits of the procedures (Tyler & Lind 1992, pp. 119-121). In contrast, group value theory, which underpins relational models of procedural justice, emphasises the importance of social group membership for individual identity and its role in psychological motivation. In common with relational models, distributive models of procedural justice claim that people assess authorities and procedures in terms of fairness, rather than self-interest. However, distributive models claim that people assess fairness in terms of outcome distribution, for example, how the outcome they receive compares to the outcome others receive, or whether the outcome falls short of their expectations (Tyler & Lind 1992, pp. 121-122). Relational models, by contrast, as discussed above, hold that judgements about fairness are linked to procedures even more than outcomes. In their contribution to this volume, Anthony Bottoms and Justice Tankebe suggest that this contrast may have been overstated by relational models, and propose a procedural justice framework that incorporates both procedural and distributive notions of fairness.

The social psychology literature is expressly descriptive, rather than normative in the philosophical sense. It offers a descriptive and explanatory account of people’s beliefs and attitudes, not an account of the moral value of procedures, such as the instrumental, dignitarian, and relational accounts proposed by philosophers, as discussed above. Kjell Törnblom, for instance, contrasts a social psychological approach to justice, which involves the scientific investigation of people’s perceptions of justice, with philosophers’ normative arguments about which political or economic system is most just (1992, pp. 177, 190). In the context of discussing legitimacy, Tom Tyler likewise explains that a social scientific perspective on legitimacy uses psychological methods of data collection to investigate the factors that cause people to feel under a sense of obligation to obey the law, while a normative or philosophical perspective asks whether people ought to defer to legal authorities and obey the law. Tyler explains that he takes the social scientific perspective on legitimacy and is not concerned with normative or philosophical issues (2003, p. 285; 2006, pp. 286-287). Social psychologists therefore understand legitimacy in a descriptive or sociological sense; namely, that an institution or authority is legitimate if those who are subject to it perceive it as legitimate, or as having the moral right to exercise authority. Philosophers, by contrast, understand legitimacy as a normative concept. An institution or authority is normatively legitimate if in fact it does have the moral right to exercise authority over those it governs and is therefore entitled to their allegiance (see, e.g., Levitov 2016 for a helpful discussion of this distinction). In their contribution to this volume, Noam Gur and Jonathan Jackson explain how legitimacy in the descriptive sense is measured, and how the felt duty to obey the law interacts with the belief that specific laws are morally justifiable, in this way strengthening people’s motive to obey the law. In her chapter, Catriona Mackenzie addresses the question of whether the four elements of procedural justice identified in the empirical literature might satisfy the criteria for both descriptive and normative legitimacy.

However, although the social psychology literature is not normative in the philosophical sense, social psychologists do use the term ‘normative’. They also use the term ‘instrumental’, although again not in the way in which philosophers use it, viz. to describe a particular normative approach to the value of procedures. Instead, social psychologists use ‘normative’ and ‘instrumental’ as opposites. As Bottoms and Tankebe explain in their chapter in this volume, social scientists use ‘normative’ and ‘instrumental’ to distinguish between different kinds of motivations for law-abiding behaviour. People may obey the law in order to avoid punishment (an ‘instrumental’ explanation based on self-interest), or they may obey the law because they believe that legal authorities are legitimate and entitled to be obeyed (a ‘normative’ explanation). Murphy’s chapter in this volume elaborates on this distinction between instrumental and normative explanations of compliance. The distinctive feature of this use of the word ‘normative’ is that it is used merely to report on, not endorse, people’s normative judgements. It is therefore consistent with the social scientists’ descriptive methodology.

Murphy makes a further distinction between instrumental and normative justifications for treating people in ways that satisfy the four procedural justice desiderata of respect, neutrality, trustworthiness, and voice. Many social scientists see procedural justice as a strategy for engineering legal compliance. Their approach is informed by findings which show (i) that people who believe that authorities have a right to be obeyed are more likely to comply with the law than people who are motivated by self-interest, and (ii) that the experience of procedural justice is a powerful factor in activating the normative judgement that authorities have such a right. This is known as the ‘procedural justice effect’ (Tyler 1987, p. 333). Combining these findings, social scientists argue that the cheapest and most effective way to secure obedience to the law is for officials to exercise power in a way that satisfies people’s procedural expectations. For instance, Riél Vermunt and Kjell Törnblom explain that psychologists apply ‘social psychological knowledge ... about justice processes ... for the purpose of reducing conflict’ (2007, p. 10). Tyler and Yuen Huo describe this justification for procedural justice as ‘psychological jurisprudence’, saying that it ‘provides a distinctly empirical, rather than normative perspective on the problems presented by the law’ (2002, p. 209). It can also be described as an ‘instrumental’ justification, because procedural justice is viewed as a technique or tool for encouraging law-abiding behaviour. By contrast, normative justifications for procedural justice of the kind discussed above would see procedural justice as a moral requirement whether or not it promotes compliance.

It is also important to be aware of both commonalities and differences in the way social psychologists and political philosophers use the term ‘relational’. In common is the idea that human beings are fundamentally social creatures and that people’s identities and sense of self, including attitudes of self-respect and self-worth, are bound up with their interpersonal relationships. As mentioned previously, social psychologists in the field of procedural justice elaborate this idea in terms of group value theory. According to this theory, people are motivated to bond with their group because positive messages about their status within the group support their sense of self-worth and validate their self-identity. For this reason, people are very attentive to cues and messages that convey information about their social group status. Group value theory is thus a descriptive hypothesis about what motivates human social behaviour.

While relational theory in ethics and political philosophy is also premised on the view that humans are fundamentally social creatures, as discussed above, it is underpinned by both normative and methodological concerns. The normative focus of relational theory is the critique of various forms of social oppression, inequality, and injustice and their effects on the lives of individual members of minority social groups. Connected with this normative concern, relational theory rejects the methodological individualism that characterises much philosophical theorising. The term ‘methodological individualism’ refers to a set of theoretical assumptions about social groups and the relationship between individuals and the groups to which they belong. In particular, methodological individualism eschews explanations of social phenomena and individual behaviour that make reference to social groups and the structural constraints imposed by group membership on individual action, choice and behaviour (Cudd 2006, p. 46). By contrast, relational theories argue that a focus on social groups and the social dynamics of power is critical for understanding how the actions, choices, and behaviour of individual members of minority social groups are constrained and shaped by oppression and inequality.

The differences between the sense in which social psychologists and philosophers use the term ‘relational’ are therefore twofold. The project of relational theory in social psychology is descriptive and explanatory: it aims to describe and analyse the psychological effects of interpersonal relationships and social group dynamics on individuals’ identities. The project of relational theory in ethics and political philosophy is normative analysis: it aims to provide a normative critique of social oppression and inequality and their impact on individuals’ lives. This difference in aim explains a further respect in which the social psychology and philosophical literatures differ in the context of theorising about procedural justice. Empirical research in social psychology has identified the importance of the four relational factors of respect, neutrality, trustworthiness, and voice for people’s perceptions of procedural justice and seeks to provide a descriptive explanation and analysis, in terms of group value theory, of why these four factors matter to people. Taking this empirical research as its starting point, philosophers influenced by relational theory in ethics and political philosophy seek to explain the normative significance of these four factors. Thus, the chapters in this volume by Ceva, Mackenzie, Stoljar, and Sorial seek to show why the relational factors identified in the empirical literature are normatively significant.