Moral Basis of Justice

Justice is a concept involving the fair and moral treatment of all persons, especially in law. It is often seen as the continued effort to do what is "right." In most of all cases "right" is determined by either the majority or logic. If a person lives under a certain set law in a certain country, justice is considered making the person follow the law and be punished if not.

All societies around the world need a prop for proper functioning of various administrative, legislative and social mechanisms. This prop is in the form of Laws. Laws govern people in various realms of life. But philosophically Laws are nothing but the meeting point of Morality and Justice. That brings us to the debate whether Justice has a moral basis.

Several theorists and intellectuals have tried looking into this. Plato one of the stalwarts in the field of philosophy had looked into the matter deeply. In his Republic he extensively discusses about the basis of Justice being morality. He tried to tie justice with and individual’s internal state, his morality, rather than to social norms or good consequences. Aristotle on the other hand believed that situations and communities are just, when individuals receive benefits according to their merits, or virtue, that is those most morally virtuous deserve more of whatever goods society is in a position to distribute. An individual who seeks more than her fair share of various goods, has the vice of greediness and a just individual is one who has rational insight into her own deserts in various situations and who habitually takes no more than what she deserves. Both Plato and Aristotle emphasized the role of reason, both in perceiving what is just and in allowing us to act justly.

But sentimentalists like Hutcheson and Hume have a different take on the issue. According to them justice has a grounding in universal benevolence rather than in morality. According to Hutcheson universal benevolence can never hinder the path of justice. Hume though believed that individual justice at least sometimes conflicts with what benevolence would motivate us to do, believing that judgments about virtue and rightness depend on our capacity for sympathy and morality rather than on some form of reason.

Societies are always debating over the right balance of justice and morality. Rawls, one of the modern stalwarts in the field famously stated that good of society as a whole cannot deny an individual his rights and justice. Even if at the cost of an individual’s justice a larger number of people benefit, it would be unjust to deny the individual his fair share. But the flaw in it is that some people who have more cannot make up for other people having less.

But Justice and Morality change with time and location. A Law considered valid at an instant may not hold at a later date. So is the case with morals. Child marriage which was a norm throughout India a few centuries back is considered unlawful and unjust among most of the educated masses at the present time. (Though in villages child marriage is still considered sacred).Morality and justice are also location dependent. Example of this can be seen by comparing morality and laws in Europe and Middle East. Polygamy though allowed in great parts of Middle East is banned in most of Europe. Prostitution though lawful in Netherlands, is a crime in Middle East and several other countries. But though Prostitution is legally allowed in Netherlands, the prostitutes are morally looked down upon.

All laws therefore may not be morally right. Capital Punishment, though applicable in lot of countries, is considered morally wrong. But this brings out the aspect of the form of government in the countries it holds. Most of the countries having Capital Punishment are either authoritarian or dictatorial. Even the four democracies, including India and United States, are debating over scrapping it.

But legally unlawful things may not necessarily be considered immoral. A good example of this is child marriage, which we spoke about earlier. In villages where it is vehemently followed it is considered sacred and any interference is considered interference with the will of their gods. In Rajasthan when a police officer tried stopping a child marriage, her hands were chopped.

Laws may not necessarily be derived from the moral standing of the society. It sometimes has to be rationally correct.

Classically, justice was the ability to recognize one's debts and pay them. It was a virtue that encompassed an unwillingness to lie or steal. It was the basis for the code duello. In this view, justice is the opposite of the vice of venality. In jurisprudence, justice is the obligation that the legal system has toward the individual citizen and the society as a whole. Justice (in both senses) is part of the debate regarding moral relativism and moral absolutism.

Moral absolutism is the belief or theory that there are absolute standards against which moral questions can be judged and suggests that morals are not determined by societal or situational influences. According to moral absolutism, morals are inherent in the laws of the universe, the nature of humanity, or some other fundamental source. Moral absolutism is often contrasted with moral relativism.

Moral absolutism regards actions as inherently or inarguably moral or immoral. Moral absolutists might, for example, judge slavery, the death penalty, or childhood female genital mutilation to be absolutely and inarguably immoral regardless of the beliefs and goals of a culture that engages in these practices.

In a minority of cases, moral absolutism is taken to the more constrained position that actions are moral or immoral regardless of the circumstances in which they occur. Lying, for instance, would always be immoral, even if done to promote some other good (e.g., saving a life). This rare view of moral absolutism might be contrasted with moral consequentialism—the view that the morality of an action depends on the context or consequences of that action. Modern human rights theory is a form of moral absolutism, usually based on the nature of humanity and the essence of human nature.

A primary criticism of moral absolutism regards how we come to know what the 'absolute' morals are. The authorities that are quoted as sources of absolute morality are all subject to human interpretation, and multiple views abound on them. For morals to be truly absolute, they would have to have a universally unquestioned source, interpretation and authority. Therefore, so critics say, there is no conceivable source of such morals, and none can be called 'absolute'. So even if there are absolute morals, there will never be universal agreement on just what those morals are, making them by definition unknowable.

The philosopher Immanuel Kant was a promoter of moral absolutism.

Moral relativism is a view that claims moral standards are not absolute or universal, but rather emerge from social customs and other sources. Relativists consequently see moral values as applicable only within agreed or accepted cultural boundaries. Very few, if any, people hold this view in its pure form, but hold instead another more qualified version of it.

Moral relativists hold that an unsharable, personal, and aesthetic moral core lies at the foundation of personal choices. They deny the possibility of sharing morality at all, except by convention. A simple way to express this view is that "everyone draws their own moral from the same story" and behaves according to their own impression, acceptance, or rejection of it. It is often confused with ethical relativism which holds that morality can be shared but only between closely-knit groups sharing a moral code and committed to joint action, e.g. an ethnic minority in a hostile situation.

A moral relativist, on the other hand, would hold that even people in such a circumstance do not follow a common moral code, but are simply unable to follow their varying personal urges due to social pressure.

Moral relativism stands in contrast to moral absolutism, which sees morals as fixed by an absolute human nature ( Jean-Jacques Rousseau), or external sources such as deities (many religions) or the universe itself (as in Objectivism).

Moral basic of justice is administered by the theory of absolutism but countered by relativism. Both the theories are supported by examples and criticized by many people. Moral absolutism can not explain many of the doubts. Consider, for example, the 6th Commandment "Thou shalt not kill": Many if not most conservatives recognize numerous exceptions, including killing in war, and killing which is necessary to defend one's own life and property and the lives and property of other (law-abiding) citizens. The commandment in question is sometimes rendered "Thou shalt do no murder", which is intended to imply the legitimacy of some of these exceptions, but this rewording is really a copout because all it really says is "Thou shalt do no bad killing", where the definition of "bad killing" is left to one's minister, one's personal proclivities, or the legislature -- none of which are widely recognized as sources of absolute wisdom.

The Sixth Commandment, however, is not a special case; for it is easy to come up with reasonable exceptions to virtually any other rule of "absolute" morality. For example, adultery is defined by law, so if laws change, or if they differ in different localities, then this means that a person might be considered to be committing adultery by one set of laws but not by another, or at one time but not another -- all of which hardly places adultery in the "absolute morality" category. Likewise, stealing is dependent on particular legal definitions, but also involves such complicated moral situations as the poor man who takes food from a rich man to keep from starving

It is important to realize that morality is not absolute, it is even more important to realize that it changes with times and situations. Perhaps the most striking example of this is sexual morality: In earlier times, the possibility of pregnancy and venereal disease made extramarital sexual intercourse virtually unthinkable for those caring to lead anything other than a thoroughly degraded life; but with the development of contraception and venereal prophylaxis, the most important barriers to extramarital sex disappeared, giving rise to the "sexual revolution". This is not, of course, to say that sexual freedom is an unmixed blessing; but it is to point out that, in at least this case, morality is dependent on the current state of technology.

As we can see that Moral absolutism have many problems, it’s not the only theory with problems. Moral relativism also have many problems with it as it could not give a proper solution to many of the situations.

Let us consider a few examples of how moral relativism affects the way many people approach public moral issues. The abortion issue is one of the main argument against relativism.

Some abortion-rights advocates, in response to pro-life arguments, emote such bumper-sticker slogans as: "Pro-choice, but personally opposed," "Don't like abortion, don't have one," or "Abortion is against my beliefs, but I would never dream of imposing my beliefs on others." These slogans attempt to articulate in a simple way a common avenue taken by politicians and others who want to avoid the slings and arrows that naturally follow a firm position on abortion. It is an attempt to find "a compromise" or "a middle ground"; it's a way to avoid being labeled "an extremist" of either camp.

The pro-abortionist's unargued assumption of moral relativism to solve the abortion debate reveals a tremendous ignorance of the pro-life position. For the fact is that if one believes that the unborn are fully human (persons), then the unborn carried in the wombs of pro-choice women are just as human as those carried in the wombs of pro-life women. For the pro-lifer, an unborn child is no less a human person simply because the child happens to be living inside Whoopi Goldberg or Cybil Shepherd. Ideology does not change identity.

Contrary to popular belief, the so-called "pro-choice" position is not neutral. The abortion-rights activist's claim that women should have the "right to choose" to kill their unborn fetuses amounts to denying the pro-life position that the unborn are worthy of protection. And the pro-lifer's affirmation that the unborn are fully human with a "right to life" amounts to denying the abortion-rights position that women have a fundamental right to terminate their pregnancies, since such a termination would result in a homicide. It seems, then, that appealing to moral relativism (or moral pluralism ala Mario Cuomo) to "solve" the abortion debate is an intellectual impossibility and solves nothing.

Another example of how ethical relativism affects the way many people approach public moral issues can be seen in the arguments concerning the right to boycott products advertised on television programs which certain groups believe are psychologically and morally harmful. The usual argument in response to these groups is, "If you don't like a particular program, you don't have to watch it. You can always change the channel." But is this response really compelling? One must point out that these groups are not only saying that they personally find these programs offensive, but rather are arguing that the programs themselves convey messages and create a moral climate that will affect others especially children in a way they believe is adverse to the public good. Hence, what bothers these groups is that you and your children will not change the channel.

As long as these groups do not advocate state censorship, but merely apply social and economic pressure to private corporations (which civil rights and feminist groups have been doing for some time now), a balance of freedoms is achieved. Both are free to pursue their interests within the confines of constitutional protection, although both must be willing to accept the social and economic consequences of their actions. This seems to best serve the public good. Notice that this position does not resort to ethical relativism, but takes seriously the values of freedom, the public good, and individual rights and attempts to uphold these values in a way that is consistent and fair.

As we can see that both moral absolutism and relativism can have some problems with it , but tells us that justice and morality are closely related ; infact , the ultimate principles of morality and justice are overlapping, if not the same.