The Exercise of Formative Justice

• In Event: Fulfillment of Self Through Adherence to Law: Formative Justice and Educational Politics

Abstract

In his 2004 work, Homeless in the House of Intellect: Formative Justice and Education as an Academic Study, Robert McClintock engages in an effort at concept formation that results in the articulation of formative justice. He argues that formative justice is:
[…] a concept that enables thinking about how people come to adhere to principle, to accept and to expect ‘the impartial and consistent administration of laws and institutions’ or other restrictions on possible behaviors, and even further, to shape the world and their conduct within it by reference to this system of thought.
This paper builds the connection between Robert McClintock’s concept of Formative Justice and Rob Reich’s concept of Minimalist Autonomy. As Reich notes, “minimalist autonomy describes a character ideal that finds its realization in the manner in which individuals cleave to their conceptions of the good, in the way they endorse what is valuable in human life and the projects they pursue.” I explore the relationship between autonomy and communication. The process of examining and evaluating commitments is often portrayed as one that exclusively occurs in the mind alone. This process of evaluation and reflective self-examination is important for citizenship and civic education. I argue that the exercise of autonomy is best understood from the vantage point of making and defending claims and engaging in dialogue. Because evaluation takes place within discourse and social vocabularies, it is likely that, at some abstract level, to be autonomous is to attend to the influences of communities and cultures. However, this paper advances this discussion further.

In this essay, I develop what I call the communicative valence of autonomy to address the role that dialogue plays in exercising formative justice. I argue that to exercise formative justice, one must attend to the communicative dimensions of the exercise of autonomy, critically analyzing values and views, and regulating motivating capacities. The paper uses a variety of examples to show how this process is best understood, by examining the life of Fredrick Douglass, Franz Fanon, and Emma Goldman.

Author

• Seth Halvorson, Bard High School Early College and Columbia University