Chapter 5. Social Justice (Sample Paragraphs)

This chapter would discuss the relationship between justice and fairness.

Justice is the corner stone of any human civilization, across all nations, all languages, all historical development, all cultural background, and all social groups. Even though human exercises of justice always involve subjective judgment, most people believe that there would be ultimate objective justice in this world. In fact, in any human society, people always ascribe the absoluteness of justice which is free of subjective relativity to divine authority, even if the society is dominated by atheist materialist culture. This is because mankind could only acquire absolute authority from supernatural or divine power superior to all human power. As a result, divine justice has been the foundation of all human justice in this world.

 

Besides the divine justice, there are another two general categories of justice: natural justice and social justice. By natural justice I am referring to the application of natural logic or knowledge when exercising justice. For example, we all know that forcing people to work under dangerous environment or poor conditions could be harmful to them, or cutting a person with knife could kill him. This kind of common knowledge could be accepted among people without any modern scientific education when making judgment about justice.

 

The last major category of justice is the social justice, i.e. the exercise of justice based on various cultural values, human experiences and personal interests. In reality, the process of exercising justice would normally be a combination of all three major categories mentioned above, and thus divine justice, natural justice and social justice are three different factors in a holistic process of exercising justice. Even though divine justice and natural justice are more fundamental in any justice process, human efforts are mainly involved in the factor of social justice, and fairness is always a central concern in any social justice.