I'm posting the generalisation about the concept of Justice for everyone's benefit - in case you didn't take it down in class.
"Justice is about restoring the balance of the moral order of things."
The expression is pretty colloquial but it encapsulates what we discussed today about compensation, punishment of the guilty, proportionality, retribution (just desserts) etc.
You could, if you like, rewrite the statement or add on to it. Are there aspects of Justice which we didn't capture?
Please go through the notes and readings.
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"Justice is about restoring the balance of the moral order of things."
ReplyDeleteThis definition of justice is sufficient but idealistic because it is often difficult to measure or quantify the "imbalance of moral order" and thus the fair compensation.
It also subtly assumes universal moral standards always exist, which is questionable. What one party perceives to be right may be wrong for another. In other words, value judgment can be subjective.
For example, recently some Muslim groups in Malaysia have cast the use of the word "Allah" by Christians as a surreptitious effort to try to seduce Muslims away from Islam, and attacked some churches. On the other hand, church officials assert that the wrod has been used for centuries to refer generally to God.
I think that Justice is a philosophy that ultimately revolves around fairness. Whenever someone commits a crime, Justice is served by punishing the criminal in accordance to the severity of his crime and thus reflects that the offender must pay something due to his crime and hence reflect the need for fairness.
ReplyDeleteFor instance, in the Poncelet case, Justice as a form of retribution was clearly put out by the director in portraying the families of the victims even wanting to resort to murder to get rid of the "beast" that killed their children. Mr Percy even wanted to take away a cop's gun and shoot Poncelet down. Therefore, the whole idea about the retributivist theory is very clear in Justice whereby "the moral order of things is restored".