preview

Justice: A Critical Analysis: The Concept Of Justice

Decent Essays
Open Document
The Concept of Justice – A Critical Analysis
Introduction
Justice is not a contemporary notion that came into existence through a legal system. It is a notion that is deep rooted in the history of civilization. In other words justice is a broad concept and each person has his or her perspective as to what justice really is and they have their own premises on which they base their ideology. Many scholars have dome commendable work on this topic and have devised various definition of justice.
Ancient Philosophers
Plato often criticized the conventional theories of justice and he came up with a definition that “justice is a human virtue that makes a person self-consistent and good. In a societal set up, justice is a social consciousness that makes…show more content…
During this time justice was closely related to politics. In other words, whatever the King decided was equivalent to justice. At that time there was only monarchy system of government and hence King was the epitome of supremacy.
1 D.R. Bhandari, Plato’s Concept of Justice: An Analysis, J.N.V. University, (July 8,
2017, 12:19 PM) https://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Anci/AnciBhan.htm Medieval Philosophers
When we hit the medieval period then a philosopher named
Augustine developed another definition of justice. In his words
“the cardinal virtue of justice requires that we try to give all people their due.”2
Another medieval philosopher, Aquinas, came up with a definition that “justice is that rational mean between opposite sorts of injustice, involving proportional distributions and reciprocal transactions.”3
In my understanding, this era marked the beginning of inequality between social as well as economic classes and thus a new approach to justice was required than mere fairness and morality. They took the foundation as morality, ethics, fairness and equity and added more elements to this
Get Access
Related
Get Access