In a Community, What is Justice?

Justice can mean many things. It's cited regularly by the law and can and does insinuate a positive force. But the question of whether justice always being positive is debatable.  

What is positive justice for one could be equally negative injustice for another, even in an identical situation. Or "justice" by the book could be considered a negative thing for all parties involved.  

Legally, justice was served in the Casey Anthony trial, but it reverberated as a negative. Because after all, who really received justice in that case? Well, our structural system would lend one to believe that all parties did, because justice is simply the service of deliberation in a community. Which brings us to the pertinent and rarely-discussed issue at hand.  

What constitutes justice for a community?

Again, the word and meaning of justice is highly contentious, its nuanced, it doesn't mean just one thing. The question of what justice is and what it should represent is highly individualized.

In a community -- large or small -- what does justice mean for you personally? And if your justice is violated, is your perception of justice the majority feeling in your community or is it a minority's understanding of justice? Have you been the victim of an injustice and therefore, you are justified to retaliate, to satisfy an injustice bestowed upon you -- one that may or may not have been caused by justice for the community as a whole?

For any community to function at a sustainable and productive level, there must be a collective sense of what type of justice the majority is entitled too.

And this justice must align closely with the justice the individual parts of everyone in a majority, right? (But what about the minority?)

So, if an individual abhors drug use, for example, and considers drug addiction a "choice" or not a victim-centered issue, is this individual receiving justice if their tax money is spent on rehabilitating an addict?

Is the addict receiving justice, in the form of treatment? And if the answer is yes, does the addict's justice outweigh the justice of the individual who feels he has received an injustice because his tax money is being spent on what he perceives as an injustice to him or her?

Well, it is not clear, but it is more definitive than one may think.

Plato states this about justice within a community:

"Each member of a community has the right to preserve his position, his privacy, his property. And his expectations are that if he behaves in a certain way, he will be allowed to maintain those rights, or even improve them. He may think that the institutions of the community have a duty to punish whoever infringes upon these. But the offender will exclaim vigorously against any attempt to exact more than the deserved punishment for what he has done; therefore, his desert constitutes his right not to be victimized, exploited, or manipulated."

Confused? Don't be!

So what Plato is basically getting at is, for a community to function, we must all find a way to solve our differences. Because at our core, we have self-appointed bias of what constitutes actual justice. And all of us deserves as much. 

Jack Kelly is a writer for his website Coffee With Caesar.