Ethics, universal principles and restorative justice

Source: (2007) in, Gerry Johnstone and Daniel W. Van Ness, eds., Handbook of Restorative Justice. Cullompton, Devon: Willan Publishing. pp. 615-630

“In Chapter 29, George Pavlich focuses upon this dimension of restorative justice and cautions against recent efforts to ascertain foundational and universally applicable restorative principles which can be used to identify and guide genuinely restorative practices. Such efforts to ground justice practices in universal ethical principles are dangerous, he argues, and should be refused. As an alternative, Pavlich argues, we should understand ethics as itself an essentially contestable discourse. Hence, we should conceive of restorative justice as an open ethical forum that is valuable precisely because it enables people to struggle with the ethical limitations of a past, unjust, way of being with one another and collectively to imagine better ways.” (excerpt)