The Philosophical-Political Particularity of question on Justice

Abstract

Before a copious literature on justice, bringing together elements of economic, law, anthropology and political science, this essay start from the Western philosophical tradition to elucidate how justice has been addressed as an object of ethical-political investigations. I tackle professor Hierro’s distinction between three concepts of justice, namely, one (extensive) that considers justice as the maximum moral virtue, almost comparable with perfection, another (strict) that reduces it to legal order and a third (intermediate between those two) that understands justice as a social virtue. I argue that the latter is the most persistent in the philosophical tradition. Beyond the range of theories, philosophy has always tended to think on justice as a moral category of politics, that is, as a criterion to validate or invalidate morally how a society is politically organized. I conclude with an overview of the paths that justice has taken in its re-distributive variable.