When Will Justice Reign?
Socrates is thought to have said:
“The quality of being morally just is the most important quality because it is only through the application of justice that freedom, happiness and truth can exist.”
Justice has been at the foundation of human existence forever. It attracts attention at specific points in time when an entity is trying to make impactful change. Globally, justice has been at the forefront of many nations in the past decades. But what is justice? To have justice, does one need to be moral/just/righteous/equitable? Justice is applicable throughout society- in social, economic, political, and legal scenarios. There are four generally accepted types of justice:
- Distributive- defining who gets what,
- Procedural- addressing how fairly people are treated,
- Retributive- assigning punishment for wrongdoing, and
- Restorative- restoring relationships to “rightness.”
The VIA Institute on Character places three character strengths in the virtue subcategory entitled justice: fairness, leadership, and teamwork. Let’s take a deeper look at each!
Fairness
According to VIA, “fairness is treating people justly, not letting your personal feelings bias your decisions about others.” If you are an individual who wants to give everyone a fair chance and believes there should be equal opportunity for all, do you also feel that what is fair for one person might not be fair for another? Where, then, do equality and equity come in? Who is to decide what is fair for one but not for another?
Via continues, “fairness is a cognitive judgment capacity that involves reasoning and making judgments. It involves 2 types of reasoning:
- Justice reasoning which emphasizes logic and weighing principles to determine moral rights and responsibilities (and)
- Care reasoning which includes empathy and compassion; the ability to put yourself in somebody else’s shoes.”
Justice in this definition then likewise embodies the virtues of humanity, wisdom, and courage.
Leadership
VIA states that as a character strength, leadership refers to “the tendency to organize and encourage a group to get things done, while maintaining good relations within the group” and involves:
- setting goals/accomplishing them,
- enlisting effective help,
- building coalitions, and
- smoothing ruffled feathers.
Leadership is a social phenomenon whereby effective leaders provide a positive vision that empowers others through either 1) practice: defining, establishing, identifying, or translating direction; or 2) personal quality: motivation to seek, attain, and carry out leadership roles.
Thought leaders identify many different leadership styles. I’d like to highlight two here:
- Transactional leaders clarify responsibilities, expectations, and tasks to be accomplished (see ‘practice’ above); whereby,
- Transformational leaders motivate their followers to perform at an extremely high level, fostering a climate of trust and commitment to the organization and its goals (see ‘personal quality’ above).
Teamwork
Like leadership, teamwork involves an individual’s commitment to contributing to a team’s success. In other words, the person high in teamwork applies a certain way of acting in whatever context they consider themselves committed to the good of the group as a whole. This can be a dedicated, reliable, contributing member of a small group like a family, company or corporation, or as large an entity as one’s country. Teamwork is closely related to loyalty, belonging, and community and is also sometimes identified with the concepts of patriotism and citizenship.
I’d like to return to Socrates’s quote however: “the quality of being morally just is the most important quality because it is only through the application of justice that freedom, happiness and truth can exist.”
How will we as a human race, bring social, economic, political, and legal justice to all our peoples?
Who is qualified to identify who gets what?
How can we address how fairly people are treated?
What groups warrant the power to assign punishment for wrongdoing?
What process must we take to restore relationships to “rightness”?
How do we ensure that each and every person experiences firsthand the freedom, happiness, and truth that Socrates alluded to?