Justice (from the Greek dikaiosyne, from the Latin iustitia) — the virtue and principle that regulates the distribution of goods, duties, rewards, and punishments, rendering to each person what is properly theirs. The classical definition, handed down through Roman law, captures it as the constant will to give each one his due (suum cuique tribuere). In Plato, above all in the Republic, justice is understood as harmony: in the soul, it exists when reason, spirit, and appetite each perform their proper task; in the city, when each class does what is proper to it. Aristotle, in the Nicomachean Ethics (Book V), distinguishes general justice, which coincides with complete virtue as exercised toward others, from particular justice, itself divided into distributive justice — which apportions honours and goods according to merit, in a geometric proportion — and corrective (or commutative) justice, which restores equality in exchanges and in wrongs, in an arithmetic proportion. In Modernity, contract theories shift the ground of justice to an agreement among individuals: for Hobbes it arises from the covenant that institutes the sovereign, whereas Locke anchors it in natural rights prior to the state. In the twentieth century, John Rawls, in A Theory of Justice (1971), defines justice as fairness: the just principles are those that would be chosen in an original position, behind a veil of ignorance concealing each person’s social standing. Closely related concepts are equity (the correction of the law’s abstract rigour in light of the concrete case) and right.
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