On the Concept of Justice: Analytical Notes

Abstract

The paper is devoted to the critical analysis of the concept of justice, which is commonly used in philosophical and scientific literature, including works specially focused on the development of theoretical conceptions of justice. It is shown that significant conceptual differences and disputes between theorists are caused not only by differences in their world outlook and methodological principles, but also the historically formed ambiguity of the term justice and logical mistakes in the developing and justification of the theories of justice. Typical mistakes are considered, namely: nondistinction of the word and concept of justice; use of the word “justice” in the nonspecific, broad meaning coinciding with meaning of the word “morality”; confusion of the theoretical conceptions and normative positions, substitution of the theory describing and explaining a justice phenomenon by the moralistic declarations; violation of “Hume's guillotine”, i.e. the logical interdiction on deducing the prescriptive statements from descriptive ones, which creates only the appearance of a substantiation of the theory. Arguments are made against the ascription to the phenomenon of morality of essentially non-moral values and motives such as love, compassion, benevolence, altruism, etc., against the interpretation of them as “higher” (in the moral sense) values compared with the motive of duty and, respectively, with a duty-oriented justice. The inclusion of these motives and actions to the sphere of morality, recognition of their “supererogation” status (as opposed to “simple due” actions in the name of justice) leads to a blurring of the specifics of morality, its principles and norms, based as Kant convincingly showed, on the idea of duty.