Justice

Justice

Justice names not a thing, but a property of things. It makes sense therefore to focus the explication on the adjective "just"—or, better still, "unjust." Doing so facilitates clarification of how justice judgments are distinctive within the larger realm of moral judgments, and the even larger universe of evaluative judgments.

The application of ordinary empirical predicates, such as "tree" or "hard," is two-tiered: based on a definition and empirical facts. Any dispute about whether such a predicate applies thus reduces to linguistic and empirical differences. Such a dispute can be resolved by agreeing on a definition and settling the empirical disagreement.

Evaluative predicates, by contrast, have this special feature that their application is only conditioned, not determined, by their definition and the empirical facts. Thus, people can disagree about whether a painting is beautiful, even if they use this predicate in exactly the same sense and also agree about all empirical features of the painting. In such cases it may be said that they have different conceptions of beauty.

The same holds for moral predicates. Despite agreement on all relevant empirical facts, people disagree about whether something is praiseworthy or not. Such a disagreement could stem from one party's failure to understand the meaning of the word; but more typically the disputants know what the word means, and their disagreement shows then that the empirical facts and the meaning of the word together do not determine its correct application.

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