Justice

Remember when you were little and you drew on your brothers face while he was sleeping (because it was going to be so funny!) but then you got caught. You had to sit in the corner for like 5 minutes and it totally sucked. Your mom tells you to be good and then lets you go play again.

As soon as you are old enough to really understand anything, your parents want you to know the importance of being good. To do this, they simply punish you for being bad. That is the mini justice system within your family. As your life continues you are told more and more often to be good. And soon it's not just "be good.", it's "be good or else.". 

If you keep being bad the punishment gets worse and worse. The small justice system of your family turns into a national law so that now if you break the rules, you face jail time instead of the corner. 

This is the type of justice that is most familiar to me. Be good or else. In Plato's The Republic the idea that "Justice is the art that gives good to friends and evil to enemies." seems like a simple (and more perfect sounding) way to describe our system. Our society mostly focuses on the punishment part of the statement. We give evil to enemies (bad people) but we don't really give good to friends (good people.)

Does this system of punishing the bad work all the time? No. But I don't think any system really could. True justice can never be truly achieved. What one person believes to be just and true can be totally different than what another person believes. No justice system could ever work flawlessly because no two people could ever agree on what is just. 

But even if we can never achieve true justice, we could definitely get closer to an ideal. 

For every dollar a man makes in the united states a woman makes only 77 cents. Two people are doing the exact same job, they have the same level of expertise and education, but one of them gets payed 23% less. Because she happens to have one more X chromosome. What's worse is that a colored woman gets paid even less. Hispanic woman are paid at 53% of white men's wage. That doesn't sound so just to me.

I can't pinpoint the precise definition of justice, but to me it has a lot to do with fairness. Nothing about this system of payment seems fair.

So society teaches us all our lives to be good and if we don't, we will be punished. This system stays with us our entire lives. Our parents were taught this way and their parents were probably too. Because there is no perfect way to achieve justice we just have to keep expanding and get as close as we can.