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JUSTICE |
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Bottom Line |
“To ask whether a society if just is to ask how it distributes the things we prize – income and wealth, duties and rights, powers and opportunities, offices and honors. A just society distributes these goods in the right way; it gives each person his or her due. |
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Significance
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Health and justice are both very important, and some say that justice was more important than health. Others, Amartya Sen for example see health and social justice as being interwoven like Warp and Weft. Of course social justice is only one type of justice, criminal justice another, but there are many issues about social justice that a term which overlap with the meanings of the term for health and for the meanings of the terms sustainability and equity.
The relationship between justice and fairness is also widely debated justice being a judgement made by the individual after his foot has been settled whereas fairness relates to the decision itself. Justice is also related to equity but if there is not equity, if some people have been treated unfairly then justice cannot be said to exist in society.
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Examples of how the term is used; Extract from the Better Value Healthcare 21st Century Glossary |
Just “To ask whether a society if just is to ask how it distributes the things we prize – income and wealth, duties and rights, powers and opportunities, offices and honors. A just society distributes these goods in the right way; it gives each person his or her due. The hard questions begin when we ask what people are due, and why.” Source: Sandel, M. (2009) Justice. What’s the right thing to do? Allen Lane, Penguin Group. (p.19)
Justice 1. “Justice, we stipulated in Chapter 1, requires meeting health care needs fairly under resource constraints, and this, in turn, requires limiting care in a publicly accountable way.”
2. “Aristotle maintains that we can’t figure out what a just constitution is without first reflecting on the most desirable way of life. For him, law can’t be neutral on questions of the good life.
By contrast, modern political philosophers – from Immanuel Kant in the eighteenth century to John Rawls in the twentieth century – argue that the principles of justice that define our rights should not rest on any particular conception of virtue, or of the best way to live. Instead, a just society respects each person’s freedom to choose his or her own conception of the good life.
So you might way that ancient theories of justice start with virtue, while modern theories start with freedom.” Source: Sandel, M. (2009) Justice. What’s the right thing to do? Allen Lane, Penguin Group. (p.9)
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