On Monday, after reading The Lottery in Babylon, we attempted to attach a definition to the concept of justice. We brainstormed and came up with words like 'fairness' and 'impartiality' in an attempt to capture the philosophical ideal of justice.
Unfortunately, most of the words we used to describe justice were somewhat vague or ambiguous in meaning. So I did a little digging around the internet to find a comprehensive definition of justice. In my search, I stumbled upon a few websites that made some important distinctions between different types of justice. The authors of these articles categorized justice into four types (distributive, procedural, retributive, and restorative).
Retributive justice will probably be the most familiar to us. When a criminal is sentenced to jail for a crime, retributive justice is in effect. From the Maiese article: "It is a retroactive approach that justifies punishment as a response to past injustice or wrongdoing. The central idea is that the offender has gained unfair advantages through his or her behavior, and that punishment will set this imbalance straight." Retributive justice focuses on the fair punishment of offenders.
In contrast, restorative justice focuses on reparations and the healing of the victim's wounds. A good example is the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, formed to repair the damage caused by years of apartheid.
Procedural justice emphasizes fair processes in the juridical process. Similar cases must be treated in like fashion, and the arbiter of procedural justice should be neutral and impartial. This type of justice is evident in concepts like common law and legal precedence.
Distributive justice concerns the fair apportioning of resources to all members of society. Dr. Shahnaz Khan describes it as "fair distribution of rewards (e.g. jobs, wealth, property) and burdens (e.g. military service, dangerous or undesirable jobs)." To many, this may not be considered just at all. The fair allowance of the opportunity for these things is a much more reasonable expectation, I believe.
All four forms of justice emphasize the fairness of their respective outcomes. Is fairness, then, the most important criterion for what is considered just? I think so. Fairness is a very relative concept, though. Does that make justice as flexible and ambiguous as fairness, then? Or is our concept of justice anchored by the laws shaping our society?
In the end, justice usually supersedes the law (as far as morality is concerned). Our conceptualization of justice, however, is shaped by the laws and regulations of our society.
I think it is interesting to have a different definition of justice for different types of issues. Although obvious for why this could be needed, I think it gives an even more ambiguous and elusive tone to the ideas of what justice is because many of these definitions acquire some type of monetary need to be implemented properly whether it be punishment of an offender (jail time, rehab, etc) or the restoration of a victim (counseling, monetary compensation, new leaders to make changes) someone has to float the bill to see it carried out. When the need for monetary support is brought into play in order to see justice "served" it can perhaps cause a bit of a bias by those implementing the justice because it is all their money being used to achieve it. With this in mind perhaps it actually their definition of justice which is really being achieved and not the states.
ReplyDeleteI find that assigning more specific definitions of justice to varying situations makes the concept of justice, in general, more relative. As presented in Plato’s interpretation of Socrates’ ideas, justice is purely an ideal and perfect notion. In actuality, there are unjust actions being committed for unjust reason in an unjust state. With that being said, I feel that in the minds of people today, wrongdoings must have consequences, which is one of the four more narrowed types of justice mentioned by Matt. It was refreshing to be able to relate to the notion of justice after the mind-boggling arguments made in our text.
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