Idea of Justice

Sphere of Application

• Political thinkers have long attempted to define the concept of justice.
• With the rise of democracy and socialism, the concept of justice has transformed into social justice.
• The contemporary problem of justice concerns the logical criteria for the allocation of goods, services, opportunities, benefits, power, honours, and obligations, especially in a situation of scarcity.
• The quest for justice involves the just allocation of both benefits and burdens.
• Justice is primarily a moral philosophy issue, but also a political philosophy problem, as it must be implemented by a political order.
• The search for justice is not relevant in:
  • Authoritarian systems, where allocation is based on the dictates of an established authority.
  • Competitive systems, where allocation is determined by the market forces.
  • Communist systems, where the rule of allocation according to need is assumed, thus eliminating the problem of justice.
• The search for justice is relevant only in an open society in a scarcity situation, where there is a demand for social advantages that are in short supply.
• Criteria of allocation must be determined in a way that is acceptable to all individuals or categories concerned.
• No final word can be given on justice, and systems should provide channels of appeal and protest to revise the criteria when needed.
• Authoritarian system: A system where everything conforms to an established order, regulated by a recognized authority.
• Open society: A society where there is freedom to criticize the existing order and reform or reformulate institutions by gaining public support for proposed changes.

Philosophical Context

• Justice is primarily about discovering the 'right' course of action, which requires distinguishing between right and wrong.
• The distinction between right and wrong is different from the distinction between good and evil.
• Good is akin to useful, profitable, or beneficial, while bad or evil implies harmful or damaging.
• Good and bad do not fall into absolute categories; something may be partly good and partly bad.
• Good and bad form a continuum, where they can be located anywhere on a scale between the two extremes.
• Right and wrong are absolute categories; something can only be either right or wrong, similar to true and false.
• Right and wrong are mutually exclusive categories; if something is partly right, it is considered wrong.
• Continuum represents a range of variables between two opposites, allowing easy access from one extreme to another.
• Dichotomy rules out any possibility of middle ground between two conflicting positions, like the two banks of a river with no connection.
• Good and bad are marked by quantitative differences, while right and wrong are marked by qualitative differences.
• Good and bad can be measured and quantified; right and wrong cannot.
• Utilitarianism, founded by Jeremy Bentham, deals with good and bad by balancing pleasure and pain in the felicific calculus.
• Utilitarianism does not focus on justice, which is why it is indifferent to the problem of justice.
• John Stuart Mill focused on the qualitative differences between pleasures, marking a departure from mainstream utilitarianism.
• Utilitarianism aims for the greatest happiness for the greatest number, but tends to subordinate the individual to the collectivity.
• Mill prioritized the liberty of the individual over the majority’s opinion, moving closer to the concept of justice.
• Mill's focus on the moral worth of policies, rather than just cost-benefit analysis, contributed to the development of Rawls's theory of justice.
• Rawls opposed utilitarianism and emphasized the importance of justice over utilitarian principles.