Conception Of Justice

John Rawls’ has a political conception of justice that comes from “fundamental intuitive ideas regarded as latent in the public political culture.” This political conception of justice should have the hope of “gaining the support of an overlapping consensus,” which is “a consensus in which it is affirmed by the opposing religious, philosophical, and moral doctrines likely to thrive over generations in a more or less just constitutional democracy.” The overlapping consensus on the conception of justice is “moral both in its object and grounds” and is different from other consensus based on “self- or group-interest” which are “fragile.” The important features of this political conception of justice are as follows: the conception is a moral
Russell Kirk starts his essay with an anecdote about a friend who rents out his cottages in Scotland charitably. Kirk writes that a renter, who decides he no longer wishes to pay rent but spends much more on cigarettes than rent, has a confused “notion of justice.” Justice is either “ordained by some Power above us” or is a “mere expediency, the power if the strong over the weak.” Kirk asserts that many people, unfortunately, hold that the latter is true and this is the source of much violence in the twentieth
Kirk further explicates the concept of justice through Plato’s perception of “justice in private character” that is seen in just persons who attain this by “balance and harmony in character” and of “justice in society,” or social justice, which is the “communal equivalent” of the proper balance and “government of reason, will, and appetite” seen in just persons. Social justice is often misunderstood, but there is a true meaning to social justice “in the eyes of the religious man and in the eyes of the philosopher” as ordained from a higher Power: persons “should live together in charity and brotherhood” and society should “endeavor to provide that every man be free to do the work” that he is best suited for “and that he receive the rewards which that work deserves.” Then, Kirk distinguishes between two applications of justice: commutative justice, a “righteous relationship” between men who give each other “goods or services” of equal value, and distributive justice, the “arrangement in society by which each man obtains what his nature and labor entitle him to.” Kirk criticizes the misunderstood notion of rights the French radicals held. Kirk also denounces that justice means uniformity or “absolute equality;" instead, advocates that justice means “to each his own.” Rawls and Kirk both have very different accounts of justice. Rawls rejects religious and philosophical ideas for the foundation of justice, but rather justice