In this essay, I will be discussing the concept of justice and how the weekly online posts have helped me build my understanding of ideas that surround this topic. I will include my own posts that I have added into the weekly forums and expand on it further discussing how the students' different view points have shaped my opinions and have given me different perspectives. This essay will then conclude to answer the topic question, "When people say they want justice, what do they mean? ".
What is Justice?.
This may seem like a straightforward question to answer, but in modern-day society it is not. Justice is an arbitrary value, and everyone's own sense of justice would have to be satisfied for universal justice to be achieved. Although ˜justice' has a vast list of meanings, it can somewhat be defined. The traditional answer is suum cuique, which is a Latin phrase meaning "to each his own " or "to each he deserves "(Crispin 2010, p.23). Justice is described as fairness, where all parties should be treated equally. Justice is being fair and punished for a crime that was committed. It comes to those who have been wronged and something is done to relieve their pain and make up for any difficulty someone else's actions have caused. In Rawls' book, he describes that "Justice means getting the burdens and benefits that we earn, it means being treated with equal dignity, it means being free of unnecessary interference with our privacy, or our behaviour or our lifestyle choices, it means seeking the greatest good for the greatest number, and it means attending to those in need, especially dire need. No discourse may extricate itself from these key terms if it hopes to be intelligible within our society." (Rawls 1971, p. 87) .
Week 1.
My first response to "The Trolley Problem", was that I would have just followed my first instinct, which was to pull the lever and avoid a far more worse accident involving four workmen.