Empathetic Justice and the Appropriateness of Emotion: Rethinking Public Judgment in Joseon Litigation Novels

Recent developments in neuroscience and comparative philosophy challenged the classical dichotomy between reason and emotion, revealing emotions as cognitive appraisals shaped by cultural norms. This paper examines how late Joseon litigation novels (The Tale of Eunae and The Tale of Sin Yeocheok) anticipate this insight through a Confucian model of “empathetic justice,” where emotions such as righteous anger serve as publicly ratified indicators for recognizing moral legitimacy when aligned with communal ethical standards. Contrary to Adam Smith’s impartial spectator, which regulates emotion through imaginative distance, Joseon-era thought valued the appropriateness (中節) and communal alignment of emotion as essential criteria for public reasoning. Analysis of royal verdicts and their fictional representations reveals how moral emotions, when ethically cultivated and publicly endorsed, functioned as both motivational forces and evaluative criteria for justice. This framework offers an alternative to Western models, with implications for contemporary debates on restorative justice and moral psychology.