Justice: meaning, kinds, and ancient, medieval and modern interpretations

1. Meaning

The word comes from the Latin jus, a bond or tie, and justitia, joining or fitting. Justice is the principle that gives each person what is due, and that joins individuals together in a fair order. The Roman jurist Ulpian, quoted in Justinian’s Institutes, defined it as “the constant and perpetual will to render to every man his due”. The whole history of the concept is a debate about what is “due” and who decides.

Justice is the end the State and its law are supposed to serve. Laws can be unjust; the idea of justice is the measure by which we judge them.

2. Ancient interpretations

(a) The views Plato rejects

Book I of Plato’s Republic examines three views of justice:

• Cephalus (traditional): speaking the truth and paying one’s debts.
• Polemarchus: giving each his due, meaning doing good to friends and harm to enemies.
• Thrasymachus (radical): justice is “the interest of the stronger”: rulers make laws for their own benefit and call obedience justice.

Glaucon adds a fourth: justice is a compromise people accept out of weakness, as in the story of the ring of Gyges.

(b) Plato’s own view

Justice is each person doing his own work and not interfering with that of others. The ideal State has three classes matching the three parts of the soul: rulers (reason, wisdom), auxiliaries (spirit, courage) and producers (appetite, temperance). Justice is the harmony that results when each class performs its function. It is a virtue of the soul and of the State, not a set of external rules.

(c) Aristotle

In the Nicomachean Ethics (Book V) Aristotle distinguished:

• Distributive justice: distribution of honours, offices and wealth in proportion to merit or contribution. Equals are treated equally, unequals unequally.
• Corrective (rectificatory) justice: restoring the balance when one person wrongs another, through courts, regardless of who the parties are.

Aristotle’s formula, treat like cases alike and different cases differently, still underlies the doctrine of reasonable classification under Article 14.

(d) Ancient India

Justice was dharma: each person performing the duties of his station, with the king upholding dharma through danda. It resembles Plato’s functional view.

3. Medieval interpretations

• St Augustine (The City of God): without justice, kingdoms are “great robberies”. True justice exists only in the City of God; earthly States achieve peace and order, not full justice.
• St Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologica): justice flows from a hierarchy of laws: eternal law (God’s reason), natural law (eternal law grasped by human reason), divine law (revelation) and human law. A human law contrary to natural law is not law but a corruption of law.
• Justice in this period was religious and hierarchical: it meant fidelity to God’s order and to one’s place in feudal society.

4. Modern interpretations

(a) Liberal (natural rights)

Locke: justice is the protection of the natural rights of life, liberty and property; a government that violates them may be resisted. Justice becomes a matter of individual rights rather than of fitting into an order.

(b) Utilitarian

Bentham and Mill: the just rule is the one that produces the greatest happiness of the greatest number. Mill (Utilitarianism, chapter V) argued that justice is the name for the most important class of social utilities. Critics object that utility can justify sacrificing a minority.

(c) Marxist

Justice under capitalism is class justice. Real justice requires abolition of private ownership of the means of production; in the final communist stage the rule is “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” (Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, 1875).

(d) John Rawls

A Theory of Justice (1971) presents justice as fairness. Imagine people choosing principles in an original position behind a veil of ignorance, not knowing their own class, talents or beliefs. They would choose:

1. The liberty principle: each person has an equal right to the most extensive scheme of basic liberties compatible with a like scheme for all.
2. The second principle: social and economic inequalities are allowed only if (a) attached to offices open to all under fair equality of opportunity, and (b) to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged (the difference principle).

The first principle has priority over the second.

(e) Critics and successors

• Robert Nozick (Anarchy, State, and Utopia, 1974): justice is about entitlement. A distribution is just if holdings were acquired and transferred justly; redistribution through taxation violates rights. He defends a minimal State.
• Amartya Sen (The Idea of Justice, 2009): instead of designing a perfectly just society, compare real alternatives and remove clear injustices; judge by what people are actually able to do and be (capabilities). He draws on the Indian distinction between niti (rules, institutions) and nyaya (realised justice).

5. Kinds of justice

1. Legal justice: laws should be just, known and equally applied, and courts impartial; includes rule of law and natural justice (hearing both sides, no one judge in his own cause).
2. Political justice: equal political rights: universal adult suffrage, equal right to contest and hold office, free elections.
3. Social justice: removal of discrimination by caste, religion, race and sex, and special protection for weaker sections (Articles 15(4), 16(4), 17, 46).
4. Economic justice: fair distribution of wealth, living wage, equal pay for equal work, prevention of concentration of wealth (Articles 38, 39, 43).

The Preamble names three of these: justice, social, economic and political. Legal justice is secured by Part III and the courts.

How this is examined

Justice is set less often than liberty and equality. October 2023 Q.2(a) asked “Define Justice. Explain kinds of Justice” for 10 marks. For that question, give the meaning with Ulpian, a compact run through Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas and Rawls, and then spend half the answer on the four kinds with their constitutional Articles. If the question names the interpretations, reverse the weight: the three periods in order, the kinds and the Preamble in a closing paragraph.