Title: Justice and Fairness - Markkula Center for Applied Ethics
Headings: Justice and Fairness
Justice and Fairness
Manuel Velasquez, Claire Andre, Thomas Shanks, S.J., and Michael J. Meyer
Also on Markkula Center for Applied Ethics
Smart Lampposts: Illuminating Smart …
Cultural (In)sensitivity in Opinion Pieces
Anonymizing Undocumented …
Ethics is the Act of Seeing
Vaccines for the Military Affect …
Five (Subtle) Types of Misinformation in …
Seeing Creation Aright: Christianity and …
How Newsweek Missed the Circular …
Mahjabeen Malik • 1 year ago
Clíona Walshe • 3 years ago
Sal Sutcliffe • 1 month ago
Eddie Goodman • 3 years ago

Content: These studies suggest that injustice still exists in the criminal justice system in the United States. Yet a third important kind of justice is compensatory justice. Compensatory justice refers to the extent to which people are fairly compensated for their injuries by those who have injured them; just compensation is proportional to the loss inflicted on a person. This is precisely the kind of justice that is at stake in debates over damage to workers' health in coal mines. Some argue that mine owners should compensate the workers whose health has been ruined. Others argue that workers voluntarily took on this risk when they chose employment in the mines. The foundations of justice can be traced to the notions of social stability, interdependence, and equal dignity. As the ethicist John Rawls has pointed out, the stability of a society—or any group, for that matter—depends upon the extent to which the members of that society feel that they are being treated justly. When some of society's members come to feel that they are subject to unequal treatment, the foundations have been laid for social unrest, disturbances, and strife.