Title: Justice (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Headings: Justice
Justice
1. Justice: Mapping the Concept
1.1 Justice and Individual Claims
1.2 Justice, Charity and Enforceable Obligation
1.3 Justice and Impartiality
1.4 Justice and Agency
2. Justice: Four Distinctions
2.1 Conservative versus Ideal Justice
2.2 Corrective versus Distributive Justice
2.3 Procedural versus Substantive Justice
2.4 Comparative versus Non-Comparative Justice
3. The Scope of Justice
3.1 Human vs non-human animals
3.2 Relational vs Non-Relational Justice
3.3 Individuals vs Institutions
4. Utilitarianism and Justice
4.1 Accommodating intuitions about justice
4.2 Utilitarian theories of justice: three problems
5. Contractarianism and Justice
5.1 Gauthier
5.2 Rawls
5.3 Scanlon
6. Egalitarianism and Justice
6.1 Justice as Equality
6.2 Responsibility-sensitive egalitarianism
6.3 Relational Egalitarianism
7. Conclusion
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Content: At the level of public policy, reasons of justice are distinct from, and often compete with, reasons of other kinds, for example economic efficiency or environmental value. As this article will endeavour to show, justice takes on different meanings in different practical contexts, and to understand it fully we have to grapple with this diversity. But it is nevertheless worth asking whether we find a core concept that runs through all these various uses, or whether it is better regarded as a family resemblance idea according to which different combinations of features are expected to appear on each occasion of use. The most plausible candidate for a core definition comes from the Institutes of Justinian , a codification of Roman Law from the sixth century AD, where justice is defined as ‘the constant and perpetual will to render to each his due’. This is of course quite abstract until further specified, but it does throw light upon four important aspects of justice. 1.1 Justice and Individual Claims
First, it shows that justice has to do with how individual people are treated (‘to each his due’). Issues of justice arise in circumstances in which people can advance claims – to freedom, opportunities, resources, and so forth – that are potentially conflicting, and we appeal to justice to resolve such conflicts by determining what each person is properly entitled to have. In contrast, where people’s interests converge, and the decision to be taken is about the best way to pursue some common purpose – think of a government official having to decide how much food to stockpile as insurance against some future emergency – justice gives way to other values. In other cases, there may be no reason to appeal to justice because resources are so plentiful that we do not need to worry about allotting shares to individuals. Hume pointed out that in a hypothetical state of abundance where ‘every individual finds himself fully provided with whatever his most voracious appetites can want’, ‘the cautious, jealous virtue of justice would never once have been dreamed of’ (Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, pp.