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: We also believe it isn't fair when a person is punished for something over which he or she had no control, or isn't compensated for a harm he or she suffered. Different Kinds of Justice
There are different kinds of justice. Distributive justice refers to the extent to which society's institutions ensure that benefits and burdens are distributed among society's members in ways that are fair and just. When the institutions of a society distribute benefits or burdens in unjust ways, there is a strong presumption that those institutions should be changed. For example, the American institution of slavery in the pre-civil war South was condemned as unjust because it was a glaring case of treating people differently on the basis of race. A second important kind of justice is retributive or corrective justice. Retributive justice refers to the extent to which punishments are fair and just. In general, punishments are held to be just to the extent that they take into account relevant criteria such as the seriousness of the crime and the intent of the criminal, and discount irrelevant criteria such as race. It would be barbarously unjust, for example, to chop off a person's hand for stealing a dime, or to impose the death penalty on a person who by accident and without negligence injured another party. Studies have frequently shown that when blacks murder whites, they are much more likely to receive death sentences than when whites murder whites or blacks murder blacks.