Social work professor Leroy H. Pelton says he has long been interested in issues of justice. His first book, The Psychology of Nonviolence, was published in 1974.
“I had become interested in nonviolence through Quakers I had met while participating in the anti-war movement beginning in the mid-1960s,” he says. “It was at that point that I began to raise questions in my mind as to what is justice, and what is moral behavior, since all sides to every conflict seem to think that it is they who act in the name of justice.”
Pelton’s interest was also shaped by his heritage. “The roots of this influence lie in the Holocaust, and in the focus on the affirmation of life and pursuit of justice found in so many parts of Jewish tradition.”
Another experience that helped hone his interest was his involvement in policy advocacy in regard to homelessness. “To me, the frame of justice I call the ‘principle of life affirmation’ suggests that our social policies should support human life — particularly in regard to basic human needs — in a nondiscriminatory manner, unconditionally, and without exception ... It seems to me that a society’s treatment of homelessness is the ultimate test of this form of justice. Our society is failing this test.”
Starting with the Bible, Pelton identifies three major frames of justice: group justice, individual desert, and life affirmation. He argues that a sense of justice has existed in the human mind from time immemorial, with the three frames coexisting. These frames cross cultural and religious divides; he finds the same fundamental conceptions in the Koran.
Pelton, who has been at UNLV since 1997, discusses the reliance on the individual desert frame — people get what they deserve and deserve what they get — in contemporary social policies that are “imbued with implicit notions in which rather arbitrarily grouped individuals are less deserving than others, or not deserving at all.” This frame, he continues, “actually often prescribes the violation of human life and discrimination.”
He concludes that the “best way to uphold the sanctity of human life is to promote greater reliance on the life affirmation frame in the development of social policy.”
