Online research in philosophy

Discusses the concept of justice, its role in daily life, differing views of justice, how governments achieve justice, and individuals and organizations that ...

In today’s society, a peculiar understanding of distributive justice has developed which holds that “social justice must be distributed by the coercive force of government.” However, this is a perversion of the ideal of distributive justice. The perspective of distributive justice which should be considered is one with its roots [...].

Aristotle's discussion of corrective justice has been generally thought to mark the beginning of the philosophical examination of tort law. In addition, many scholars consider corrective justice, of one form or another, the main normative alternative to the economic analysis of law for explaining not only tort law but also private law and law in general. Most discussions of Aristotle’s conception of corrective justice in the law review literature, however, have failed to account for the established reading of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics as proposing a teleological form of ethics. Accordingly, Corrective Justice and the Revival of Judicial Virtue argues for a teleological interpretation of Aristotle's conception of corrective justice. The teleological conception of corrective justice does not attempt to analyze corrective justice merely as a formal (Weinrib), substantive (Wright), or political (Heyman) conception of equality or freedom that can be applied by technical reason to various circumstances. Rather, it maintains that corrective justice is a moral virtue of the judge that cannot be fully understood without specifying its relationship to practical wisdom and the telos of the good life. Under this reading, Aristotle’s conception of corrective justice specifies a method of judicial decision making whereby only the practically wise (i.e., morally virtuous) judge can know the content of corrective justice in all cases. Judging requires moral virtue not technical, philosophical or legal, expertise. Consequently, this article advocates a revival of Aristotle’s notion that judicial virtue requires moral virtue.

Engaging in a dialogue with such major representatives of the dominant consensus as Kant, Habermas, and Rawls, and informed by the philosophical writings of ...

Countering the present trend in the discourse on justice wherein human reason is perceived and marginalized as an embarrassment to justice and the trend to reject the concept of formal justice, this paper argues that there is formal justice and the essence of justice is setting things right and setting righteousness to stand straight. By this token, justice means the rule of reason, not the rule of power and desire, and the ethics of justice differs fundamentally from the ethics of care/benevolence. The popular assumption that justice as the rule of reason is incompatible with the idea of justice as accommodating diversity is unjustified. The paper joins the present discourse on justice from a historical perspective. It examines the historical Confucian and neo-Confucian concept of justice in a way of its dialogues with other Western concepts of justice such as Plato's concept of justice.

The main aim of this paper is to challenge the validity of the distinction between legal justice and social justice. It is argued that what we usually call legal justice is either an application of the more fundamental notion of social justice to legal rules and decisions or is not a matter of justice at all. In other words, the only correct uses of the notion of legal justice are derivative from the notion of social justice and, hence, the alleged conflicts between criteria of social and legal justice result from the confusion about the proper relationship between these two concepts. Two views about the social justice/legal justice dichotomy are of particular importance and will provide the focus for the argument: this dichotomy is sometimes identified with a classical distinction between distributive and commutative justice and sometimes with the distinction between substantive and procedural justice.

Introduction : doing the right thing -- Utilitarianism -- Libertarianism -- Locke : property rights -- Markets and morals : surrogate motherhood, military service -- Kant : freedom as autonomy -- Rawls : justice as fairness -- Distributive justice : equality, entitlement, and merit -- Affirmative action : reverse discrimination? -- Aristotle : justice and virtue -- Ability, disability, and discrimination : cheerleaders and golf carts -- Justice, community, and membership -- Moral argument and liberal toleration -- Morality and law : same-sex marriage, for and against.

The Book of Exodus describes the identity of justice and the law. Because elsewhere the gap between justice and the law is so wide -- in Christian theology when it sees the Pharisaic law as inhibiting the realization of justice; in philosophy where from Plato on, law is formal while is justice substantive; in political theory, which includes those who endorse "procedural justice" when they abandon substantive justice -- this radical biblical vision, wherein the law is justice is surely unique. This is not an understanding of the law as a series of prescriptions, the "yoke of the law" but the minimal requirement of respect for another's life and responsibility for those lacking protection: the widow, orphan, and poor. Emmanuel Levinas has noted the revolutional aspect of this revelation of justice, and defined the heirs of Abraham as those who have duties toward the other.

Introduction -- The starting point : Aristotle's classification of justice -- High scholastics -- Late scholastics -- A special theological problem : divine justice -- Jewish commentators -- Post scholastic writers -- The modern use of Aristotle's forms of justice.

People currently regard justice as the main principle of institutions and society, while in ancient Greek people took it as the virtue of citizens. This article analyzes Aristotle’s virtue of justice in his method of virtue ethics, discussing the nature of virtue, how justice is the virtue of citizens, what kind of virtue the justice of citizens is, and the prospect of the virtue of justice against a background of institutional justice. Since virtue can be said to be a specific individual character, Aristotle also defines the virtue of justice as the character of justice, with which citizens act justly and desire to do what is just. The virtue of justice is also an individual ethical virtue, differing from others for it is at the same time a social ethic. We can call the virtue of justice a “non-individual individual ethical virtue.” It has been explained as between pure altruism and egoism, which is a wrong explanation. John Rawls regards justice as the first virtue of social institutions, challenging Aristotle’s virtue of justice, an assertion which also needs further deliberation.