Justice, Theories of

The question “What is justice?” is the first problem addressed by Plato's Republic. It has remained a central question in all moral, legal, and political thought. There are narrow and broad uses of the terms just and justice. In its narrowest sense, justice is close to lawfulness, and a just act is a legal one, meaning primarily that it is not illegal. Another narrow use is procedural, with the sense that certain decisionmaking procedures deliver a product that a state calls justice.

In its broader senses, which are of the greatest interest to philosophers and other theorists, justice is thought of as an attribute either of acts, including transactions and decisions; of conditions, including rules and laws; or of entities, including persons, gods, societies, and states.

Aristotle held that the creation and maintenance of justice was the most important task of the state. A just state was ruled in the interests of the whole population, while an unjust state was ruled in the interests of its ruling class. Aristotle distinguished between distributive and commutative justice. The first deals with the distribution of rights, benefits, costs, and responsibilities within a class, for example, among citizens of a state, among family members, or among stakeholders in a corporation. The second, now widely known as retributive justice, deals with the treatment of individual persons or interests—for example, in a transaction or in meting out punishment. This second way of thinking about justice involves consideration of what people deserve according to some standard, such as law or precedence. Poetic justice, in which one unexpectedly gets what he or she deserves, is a notion of retributive justice. The distributive notion of justice involves, as Aristotle has it, treating equals equally and unequals according to their relevant inequality—so that, for example, juveniles and adults are accorded differing rights and responsibilities with regard to alcohol, marriage, driving, and voting. Injustice would clearly arise from treating a member of one class according to the rules laid down for the other class.

Today, theorists are unlikely to assert that there are two distinct conceptions involved in our thinking about justice, though most will agree that we have notions about justice that can be at odds with one another. Each of several employees might deserve all of the bonus dollars available in a given year, but it might still seem more just to divide the money among them. In that case, the desire for a kind of distribution is apparently at odds with the desire to give what is deserved. Some contemporary theorists emphasize the notion of distributive justice while others emphasize individual rights and thus the retributive notion of justice.

The concept of social justice takes justice as the attribute of a society in which a certain pattern of distribution is roughly realized throughout the most important institutions of society. To discover the right distributions, John Rawls attempts to produce a hypothetical social contract. His basic idea is that a contract made under certain constraints will guarantee justice. These constraints involve assuming a “veil of ignorance”—we choose social arrangements from behind this veil by supposing that we must enter the world our policy choices create, though we are ignorant about how we will enter it, meaning that we might enter it in any condition of wealth or poverty, health or ability, race or gender. The veil of ignorance ensures choices for political and social arrangements that will be acceptable to all because it prevents choices based on discrimination among types or classes. By ensuring impartiality in decision making, it guarantees fairness in the distribution of benefits and costs in a society, and hence a just society. Many have argued that Rawls's method of achieving impartiality refers all decisions to rationality alone, apart from habit, passion, or prejudice. However, that claim has often been rebuffed with the suggestion that Rawls merely rationalizes moral intuitions that may themselves be rationally unfounded or unappealing.

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