Pluralist Justice and its Limits: The Case of Northern Ireland

This article is a philosophical critique of certain communitarian conceptions of justice. It focuses on the work of Michael Walzer who argues that justice reflects the shared understandings of particular historical communities. In assessing the implications of this view for a divided society such as Northern Ireland I wish to set limits to this pluralist notion of justice. In the later part of the article I turn to Jürgen Habermas's proceduralist, universalist discourse ethics so as to transcend these limits and to argue that justice in Northern Ireland can only be achieved if the participants involved begin to adopt the critically-reflexive stance towards their identities that real discourse requires.