justice
The desire to be treated fairly, and to see others
treated fairly, is a fundamental human impulse.
We seek justice in our own lives, and many of us
promote it in the lives of others. Injustice strikes us
as unnatural, an imbalance that should not be toler-
ated in moral, humane societies. Some would even
argue that justice is the most important factor in
making a moral society, saying that without justice,
there can be no true moral authority. Philosophers
do not agree, however, on virtually any aspect of
justice. There are controversies involving whether or
not actions can be considered just, what intellectual
paths we must take to make those determinations,
how justice should be carried out, and whether or
not there can be such a thing as “natural” justice—
that is, universal principles that all societies should
follow.
Justice is a complicated subject because what is
“right” may not always be what is “just,” and what
is “just” may not always be “right.” For instance, a
culture that follows the Old Testament precept of
“an eye for an eye” might call killing an innocent
person to avenge the death of another innocent
person “just.” Few of us, however, would call that
the right course of action. Conversely, the institu-
tion of slavery might help a local economy function
well, leading some to label it “good,” but it would
be impossible to argue that slavery is ever “just.”
Literature explores the complexities surrounding
the concept of justice often. For instance, when the
lion Aslan agrees to be sacrificed in place of the
traitor Edmund in C. S. Lewis’s the Lion, the
witch, and the wardrobe, he is conforming to the
laws of Narnia, laws whose stated role is to deliver
justice. Edmund, after all, did commit treason, and
treason should be punished. For Edmund to die at
the hands of the White Witch might be justice, but
Aslan knows it would spell disaster for the future of
Narnia, so he dies in Edmund’s place. Conversely,
the women of Susan Glaspell’s play triFLes sub-
vert justice, becoming criminals themselves in the
process when they hide evidence that might convict
Minnie Wright. What they do may not be just, but
Glaspell definitely wants us to believe that what they
do is right.
This question of what is “just” and what is “right”
is one of the questions philosophers grapple with
when they discuss justice. Serious explorations of
the problem must examine first whether or not we
can ever rationally justify these terms, which seem so
very subjective. If we can justify them, then we are
left asking the equally difficult questions of “How
ought we to act in order to be just?” and “How ought
social institutions be structured so as to achieve jus-
tice?” (Buchanan and Mathieu 12).
Some theories of justice are retributive—that is,
they are concerned with using punishment to restore
the imbalance created by the injustice of crime.
This type of justice is almost exclusively associated
with criminal justice. When it is properly retribu-
tive, those who have taken “unfair advantage of the
law abiding populace” are punished in proportion
to their crime (12). The killers depicted in Tru-
man Capote’s in coLd bLood, Dick Hickock and
Perry Smith, brutally murder a family of four. They
performed this deed, as Capote notes through his
title, “in cold blood.” What this phrase indicates
is that there were no mitigating circumstances to
explain why they committed this crime. In William
Shakespeare’s otheLLo, the title character kills his
wife, Desdemona, because he believes she has been
unfaithful; it is a crime of passion that he commits
in a fit of rage. But Hickock and Smith kill the
Clutter family calmly and without remorse. When
society seeks justice for this offense, then, it seeks
the highest penalty. Because Hickock and Smith
took lives so coldly, they must pay with their own.
This is retributive justice. While we may not always
agree on just how to make all punishments fit their
crimes, the concept itself is relatively simple.
Distributive justice, on the other hand, is a much
more complicated concept. Theories of justice that
are distributive seek to regulate social and economic
inequalities. The distribution of goods in a society
can never be perfectly equal: Some will always have
more than others, due to differences in intelligence,
skill, personality, or sheer luck. Distributive justice
asks us to determine how this inevitable imbalance
might be most fairly corrected. One of the founda-
tional principles of distributive justice, sometimes
called the “formal principle” and usually attributed
to the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, is thatjustice 65