What is Justice?

Here are the results from the discussions last class on how you would define justice:

Justice is...

1st Period – getting what one deserves in terms of punishment and reward; karma

2nd Period – the fair, balanced and reasonable distribution of “stuff”

3rd Period – the fair dispersal of rewards and punishment

4th Period – the perception of what’s due; the permissibility of making honest mistakes

So for the most part, justice is something external that is done to you, and it’s evenhanded.

When we talked about the Ancient Greek religion (what we refer to now as the Greek myths), we talked about how the myths coalesced into a shared heritage of ancestral memories relayed down generations and later, how they formed patterns of belief that gave meaning to life and formed the basis of moral codes.

One of those patterns might be reflected in your conception of justice, the mythopoeic ethic. In Greek mythology, the “moral of the story” often revolved around punishment and reward: please the gods and be rewarded; oppose the gods and standby for punishment.

Perhaps there’s some resonance between your conception of justice and your life here at the Academy. We’ll see what Socrates has to say about that…