Author: Haroon Khalil
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Concept of Justice in the Medieval Period
Justice as triumph of theocratic principle St. Augustine—Conception of justice as Christian ideal: Travelling through various political upheavals but now not witnessed by Cicero or Seneca or such a statesman, Roman Empire in its monarchical form also had closed and gone by the fith century AD. With the decline of the Roman Empire, there came the…
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Marcus Tullius Cicero—Concept of Justice founded on natural law
In Cicero, we find a great Roman statesman and an eminent political thinker whose De Republica (the Republic or the Commonwealth, the ideal state) combines the ideals of Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Politics and is comparable to both. His other book, De Legibus (The Laws) provided the type of legal system that his ideal state would require. Cicero wrote when the republican constitution of Rome was under…
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Concept of Justice During Roman Period
Justice according to the natural law and right reason The Greek thinkers were oriented towards justice as a principle relevant to the social order. Plato argued for harmony of classes in accordance with station in life and Aristotle struggled for distributive justice. Their conception of justice was for a social order in the polis, the city-state.…
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Aristotle—Concept of distributive justice
Greek political philosopher, Aristotle seeks to construct an ideal polity with a balanced class composition, which means a predominant middle class, neither extreme of poverty nor extreme of aristocracy. However, the problem of relative claims of classes to power in polity needs to be resolved and criteria to be found out for justifying relative claims.…
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Justice During the Greek Period: As a Virtue of the Social Order
Plato—Concept of justice as moral conduct by individuals and social classes The principle of justice is the central argument in Greek political philosopher Plato’s Republic. According to Will Durant, Plato seeks ethical solution of an ethical problem. The ethical problem is what ‘is the crux of the theory of moral conduct. What is justice? Shall we seek…
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Diverse Perspectives on Justice
Justice has been a widely debated throughout political history and has been understood differently. We may survey briefly some of the representative interpretations given by great political thinkers in different ages of political history.
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Introduction
In political theory, a great debate revolves around the normative concepts of equality, fairness, justice, common good, general welfare, etc. These are called normative concepts because they generally prescribe ethical or moral standards. If these normative concepts have any meaning as organizing principles of social and political life, then we must understand what they are…
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Marxian Views on Equality
Concepts such as equality before the law (legal equality), equality of opportunity, equality of results or outcomes, etc., are related to either liberal or welfare or social democratic perspectives. They suggest that equality can be or should be sought while private ownership of property remains intact. In fact, the very search for equality is based…
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Liberty and Equality Are Compatible and Complementary
While laissez-faire, liberal-capitalist, negative liberal and libertarian perspectives reject any complementary relationship between liberty and equality, positive liberal, social-democratic and state welfare perspectives treat the two as compatible and complementary. The argument follows the following lines: Tawney in his book Equality maintains that equality is necessary to make liberty substantive. For him, liberty should imply not only civil…
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Liberty and Equality Are Incompatible and in Conflict
The argument of incompatibility of liberty and equality is primarily based on the assumptions that search for social and economic equality is against individual liberty and economic freedom. This is because, they argue: Alex de Tocqueville in his Democracy in America treats development of democracy as a sign of ‘the formation of a “modern society” (by contrast…