Justice Outside the Vacuum

Paper Summary:

This paper examines a variety of authors, from Plato to John Rawls and looks at why the varied theories of justice presented by these philosophers have not arrived at a single answer to the question "What is Justice?". Over the course of hundreds of years, no system of justice has addressed the fundamental divide between theory and reality- what roles do human nature and society play when determining what a just society is? The author asserts that these questions must be answered in order to describe a system of ultimate reality. The metaphor of Schroedinger's Cat is used, in addition to 8 well known authors - John Rawls, Plato, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Donne, John Stuart Mill, Henry David Thoreau, James Madison and George Clinton.

From the Paper:

"From the earliest recorded writings on philosophy, the concept of justice has been a source of heated debate. The ancient Greek philosopher Socrates offers the theory "... that justice is the excellence of the soul, and injustice the defect of the soul" (Plato). The modern philosopher John Rawls envisioned a system of "justice as fairness", in which the principles of justice are "the principles that free and rational persons concerned to further their own interests would accept in an initial position of equality as defining the fundamental terms of their association" (199). In the hundreds of years that separate the two, many more theories have been discussed. Each philosopher adds to the concept his idea of where justice might come from, and how society might endeavor to become just. Yet in those thousands of years, no single thinker has described a working model for a society that is perfectly just."

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• Book Review # 110085 : "Justice in "The Canterbury Tales"
• Analytical Essay # 143001 : "Justice of the City and Justice of the Individual"

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