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Originally Posted by glatt
This gets to the heart of it. The next question would be: "Do we even need justice then?" Or "Why do we need justice?"
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Yes, this is the next question, and it gets significantly more difficult from this point forward. The answer to this question will rest heavily on how we understand moral value.
For the moral objectivist, the answer is fairly simple: justice is a retributive act merited by immoral acts. If I steal $20 from you, retributive justice holds that three acts have happened:
(1) An act of transgression toward you, that should be repaid by me giving you back $20
(2) An act of trangression toward the social group that we belong in. By breaking the social code against stealing, I have weakened the social fabric by an indeterminate amount. This is a harder retribution to fix, but our current legal code recognizes that it exists. I think it is also a moral fact. This is why if I steal, I might have to pay back additional fines on top of repaying the money.
(3) An expression of internal impropriety, a breaking down of my internal moral ordering that prevents me from performing bad acts. This leads to two additional demands of justice: (a) equipping the person with the means and impetus to reorder their internal moral sense (rehabilitation). (b) if the internal impropriety is significant enough (i.e. a willingness to do violence to others) then a removal from the social arena until that moral ordering is repaired.
For people who hold to a different sort of moral scheme, Justice becomes a much harder, much less tangible concept. If you are a moral relativist, then all justice becomes social contract, and whatever demands a society places on each other becomes the basis for justice. For a utilitarian, this becomes even harder, because all moral acts are measured by their eventual consequences. For the utilitarian, imprisoning a wrongly accused person would be perfectly acceptable if the net social gain outweighed the individual losses to the innocent person.
I know we have people on this board who are social relativists and consequentialists (utlitarians), and can throw together a better representation of how those views construe the idea of justice. I'd be eager to learn ...
-sm