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Justice

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Encyclopedia of Business and Professional Ethics
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Synonyms

Synonyms for injustice and unjust: oppression, discrimination, rights violations, illegitimate power, theft; Synonyms for justice and just: fairness, equity, equality, human rights, civil rights, liberty, democracy

Definition

Justice and injustice are evaluative concepts, as are the related concepts of just and unjust. That is, the meaning of a phrase that uses any of these words contains a positive (justice and just) or negative (injustice and unjust) evaluation of some referred to entity. This raises several very difficult questions. Key among these are: (1) What sorts of entities do these concepts evaluate? (2) What is the criteria by which the evaluation is applied? (3) What are the grounds for criteria of justice? (4) In what sense do such evaluations exist?

For example, can I say a social practice is unjust? Under what conditions would my claim be true or false? How can I know if I was right or not, and what arguments or evidence could I present to others to convince...

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References

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Correspondence to John Douglas Bishop .

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Bishop, J.D. (2023). Justice. In: Poff, D.C., Michalos, A.C. (eds) Encyclopedia of Business and Professional Ethics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22767-8_225

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