what is justice?

justice denotes placing things in their rightful place. It also means giving others equal treatment. justice is also a moral virtue and an attribute of human personality, as it is in the Western tradition. Justice is close to equality in the sense that it creates a state of equilibrium in the distribution of rights and duties, but they are not identical. Sometimes, justice is achieved through inequality, like in unequal distribution of wealth.

I would think that Justice :

- if there is a dispute between two parties - is Fair

- if there is an infringement - then punishment to the accepted norm of society (note - the accepted norm would provide equal/comparable/fair punishments - but as many cases simply aren't comparable - the accepted norm would be the starting place).

Justice by it's very nature, is subjective. It is not objective. Attempting to make it objective is why the Law can be viewed at times as so unjust.

As an example : 'set' fines are very biased towards the rich (as it is much less of a punishment for them, than it is for the poor). A $200 fine could be 2 months spare cash (after living expenses) for a poor person, and be an hours spare cash (after living expenses) for a rich person. Punishing the poor effectively 2 months labor and the rich to just 1 hour is unjust.....and yet if you made the Fine a %/income based fine - then punishing one person $200 for (lets go traffic) speeding 10 over, and another person $5000 for speeding 10 over, is also unjust....ie - justice is screwed either way, and is not a perfect system.

I agree with Vikorr that justice is subjective and to add to that it's a lot like moral relativism. We see people take justice into their own hands such as internet vigilantism. But there's the problem of there being a catch 22 when implementing justice either by lawful means or in ones own hands.

I think societies have varying degrees of justice and would be relative to the society. Take sharia law for example. Some of the punishments would be seen outrageuos given if it were in a different context of society. But other societies might frown on other societies laws for being to lenient, say with murderers or what ever it be. Vikorr said it well that justice is not a perfect system and so how could we identify what is just or unjust given that justice is not perfect.

Justice is vengeance. Someone causes you to suffer, they must suffer in return.
Later there came a slightly revised idea of justice. Someone does you wrong, they must right that wrong, and justice is done. Usually, a combination of the two is what passes for justice. But the idea of retribution is central to the concept of justice.