Justice
Ancient Greek believed justice as harmony.
Distributive Justice
Justice as Equality: the belief that everyone should get the same kind and amount of stuff.
Need-based Justice: everyone shouldn’t get the same, because our needs aren’t the same.
Merit-based Justice: Justice actually means giving unequally, based on what each person deserves.
John Rawls argued Justice is Fairness. Robert Nozick disagreed.
Negative right is the right not to be interfered with. While a positive right, you’re entitled to help getting it, if you can’t get it yourself; which also implies obligations.
Retributive Justice: the only way for justice to be satisfied is for a wrongdoer to suffer in proportion to the way he’s made others suffer.
Utilitarianists focused on welfare maximization, proposed rehabilitation. Others see punishment as deterrence.
Restorative Justice: the focus is making amends, rather than on making the wrongdoer suffer.
Discrimination
Discrimination: the favoring of one group over another group in the absence of any morally relevant differences.
Peter Singer asked the “color-blind” shop owner with racists customers: does the shop owner have the liberty to do whatever they want to?
The more freedom shop owner has, the less freedom the people they’re discriminating against will have.
Judith Jarvis Thomson argued
Discrimination that favors a historically underprivileged class is more likely to be acceptable than discrimination that favors a historically privileged class.
Robert Nozick disagreed as the race is not in our control.
One response to Nozick is that justice isn’t always the same as being fair.