Justice
Justice is defined as the exercise of authority exercised by one or more persons to take control of the affairs of another. In other words, justice refers to control as well as the discipline of a human activity. This word, however, has a broader meaning than simply obtaining what is due to a person. For many philosophers, justice is equivalent to moral judgment and the pursuit of right.
Justice, from its widest sense, is defined as the obligation to act justly and to administer justice in society. However, it also involves a range of related concepts such as fairness, impartiality, equal access, and retribution. Justice is frequently described as the standard of conduct that governs conduct – a standard of morality, according to some philosophers. Others view justice as a symbol for society. The aim behind a just and equitable distribution of societal goods and entitlements is, on the one hand, to meet basic needs and to protect the welfare of the human person, on the other, to promote social cooperation and improve the conditions of the contemporary society in the interest of its citizens.
Justice, according to most people, is the state or condition of being accorded justice in the form of retribution. Although this may seem a limiting concept, justice can be understood to refer to at least two concepts. Some people believe that justice is merely the substitution of one penalty for another, such as the taking of life in order to prevent the commission of a crime. Others subscribe to the view that justice is the substitution of some other penalty, such as the payment of tax in the form of taxes to be redistributed to the people who were the victims of the crime. While some might hold that justice is a simultaneous concept, others believe that justice is the only concept that properly identifies the ends of justice and the means by which justice can be attained.
Justice, then, is both a principle and a practice. The principle of justice is that whatever is just should be accepted as just, regardless of its negative consequences; and the practice of justice is the way that we identify and punish the offenders, including the imposition of punishment by the government. Justice, then, requires a virtue.
Justice, according to many philosophers, consists of three elements. These are cleanness, impartiality, and courage. Cleanness refers to a state of mind in which judges do no injustice, and neither favor nor harm anyone. In terms of impartiality, judges must be seen to take into account the perspectives of all the stakeholders in society.
Another essential virtue of justice is courage. Courage is the power to face the fear, hatred, and uncertainty, and to act even when it seems that what you are doing is not the right thing to do. For instance, the judge who imposed a long-term prison sentence against an individual who had tried to rebel against the state would likely have been courageous if that decision had not been unjustified, and the same judge who was prepared to imprison civilians without trial for acts of terrorism may have been courageous in imposing harsh punishments on war criminals. A third element of justice is retribution, which compels the state to undertake retributive justice, such as removing criminals from society, or letting them serve time in rehabilitation centers.
One of the most interesting philosophical discussions about justice concerns the concept of justice itself. Some people are confused by the idea that there are two distinct strands of justice and think that there might be an inherent conflict between distributive justice and racial justice. It is true that there are sometimes two concepts of justice, but they are often distinguished by how they apply to different moral theories. A fair-minded person could believe that all human actions are essentially equal, and that racial inequality is irrelevant. Thus, for this person, racial injustice would not play a role in choosing the appropriate sentences for criminals.
However, the concept of justice itself leads to an inconsistent picture of the world. Theists tend to think that all human actions are equally moral, and that there is no reason to expect any unequal treatment on the basis of race, gender, religious beliefs, or national origin. Some do think that equal treatment under law is possible; they use the example of the women’s right to vote as an argument against aristocratic rule in ancient Athens. By combining distributive justice with religion and a vague sense of rightness, some progressive thinkers have been able to create a theory of justice that is in effect today, even in the United States.
