The Legal Theory Bookworm recommends The Two Faces of Justice (Hardcover) by Jiwei Ci. Here is a description:
Justice is a human virtue that is at once unconditional and conditional. Under favorable circumstances, we can be motivated to act justly by the belief that we must live up to what justice requires, irrespective of whether we benefit from doing so. But our will to act justly is subject to conditions. We find it difficult to exercise the virtue of justice when others regularly fail to. Even if we appear to have overcome the difficulty, our reluctance often betrays itself in certain moral emotions.
In this book, Jiwei Ci explores the dual nature of justice, in an attempt to make unitary sense of key features of justice reflected in its close relation to resentment, punishment, and forgiveness. Rather than pursue a search for normative principles, he probes the human psychology of justice to understand what motivates moral agents who seek to behave justly, and why their desire to be just is as precarious as it is uplifting.
A wide-ranging treatment of enduring questions, The Two Faces of Justice can also be read as a remarkably discerning contribution to the Western discourse on justice re-launched in our time by John Rawls.
And two blurbs:
A stunningly original and interesting book. Both in its main line of argument as well as in its critical readings of other authors, this book is a quite unique product that raises very interesting questions both about how societies function and about our own moral vocabulary. Ci is thinking from outside the box of ordinary moral philosophy about its historical emergence and its connections to the moral psychology of citizens in modern societies.–Thomas Pogge, Professor of Philosophy, Columbia University
This is an exceptionally interesting work which presents a highly novel and remarkably wide-ranging discussion of justice as a virtue of individual human beings and as a property of social institutions. Although this is in the first instance a philosophical treatment, it very deftly integrates perceptive psychological observations and some social theory into an argumentative structure that has a wider scope and greater plausibility than much of the straightforwardly analytical discussion in the existing literature about justice. Ci brings a combination of freshness, penetration, and complete lack of parochialism in the treatment of the basic topic. The breadth of Ci’s vision of the field gives the text a marvelous richness. This book is a model of the kind of positive cosmopolitanism one can hope will be the future of philosophy.–Raymond Geuss, Reader in Philosophy, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Cambridge
Ci’s book is remarkable for its originality on a topic where many paths of argument and analysis are well worn. Highly recommended.