According to Webster’s dictionary justice is ‘the quality of being just or fair, the act of determining rights and assigning rewards or punishments. There are several great people who have spoken about justice on several occasions. Every individual needs to be accountable for what-so-ever they do. For instance, for a student like me, it is most important to do justice by studying to the best of my ability and get good grades.
By doing so, I will do justice to the institution which is taking care of my education as well as my parents who are paying my education fees. Secondly, I believe in the legal system and I feel it is the most proper way to measure justice. It is one of the most important aspects of one life to do justice and to get justice. There are also instances when the guilty are punished but at the same time, the innocent are also punished. For instance, when a murderer is given the death penalty, his family did nothing wrong, but have to bear the burden of his absence. Here the court has done justice by punishing the criminal, but there are other family members who suffer from the decision.
When the technical aspects of justice are discussed justice is divided into two groups – distributive justice and retributive justice. Distributive justice deals with the proper allocation of wealth, power, reward, respect between different people. For instance, according to the egalitarianism theory of distributive justice, the proper distribution of wealth should be an equal one. In other words, no individual in a group should have more or less than any other individual in that group.
This is also true for other types of goods. Retributive justice is associated with the proper response to wrongdoing. For example, the lex talionis (law of retaliation) is a theory of retributive justice that says that proper punishment should be equal to the wrong suffered, and it is like life for life, fight for a fight, hand for hand, leg for leg and so on. The meritocratic theory states that goods, particularly wealth and social status, should be distributed to match individual merit, which is generally understood as some combination of talent and hard work. In other words, this theory says that it should be only for those who work hard to achieve it (Economist’s View). For example, a singer needs to practice to get recognition from the public as a good singer.
I would like to say that there are several legends who have spoken on the topic of justice. There are also various religious groups defining justice in different forms. But in general, I feel that justice is the right of every individual. Each and every person need to be responsible to do justice to all individuals with whom they are associated. They need to do justice to the profession they are into and also abide by the laws of society. Besides, those who seek justice should be given justice if they deserve it.
Work cited
Economist’s View Meritocracy, [2007]. Web.