Home » Social Justice » Types of Justice

Types of Justice

Procedural Types of Justice:

Procedural justice consists in employing correct methods to develop rules of conduct to ascertain the facts of a particular case or to devise a total appreciation absorbing rules and facts into a final dispositive judgement. Among the classic philosophers only Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas showed sufficient awareness of the functional relations between standards and rules, evidence and facts and judgments to inquire with care into the principles of procedural justice.

Substantial Types of Justice : Although Aristotle treated justice as a particular virtue and the one most necessary for a state's welfare, he recognized the prevalence of general justice in popular usage. He implied two categories of justice which are as follows :

Distributive Types of Justice: It applies to the allotment of honour, wealth and other social goods and should be proportionate to civic merit.

Corrective Types of Justice : It may apply in the first instance to private, voluntary exchanges outside the law courts, is confided peculiarly to the judiciary whose duty is to restore a middle point of equality whenever it is lacking between the parties.

The sense of social injustice is an indissociable blend of reason and empathy, evolutionary in its manifestations. It is not mere intuition. Without reason the sense of injustice could not identify the transactions that provoke it, nor could it serve the interests of social utility without the empathy, it would lack its emotive heat and its capacity to impel men to act.

In this perspective social justice means the active process of preventing or remedying that would arouse the sense of injustice. Thus the experience of the sense of injustice is itself a dramatic as it invites men to join with one another in perceiving danger in resisting it and in exulting over an achieved success all of which are public acts of solidarity. Social justice is more than a static equilibrium or a quality of a human will. It is an active process or agenda or enterprise. The reluctance of the legislature and the executive to take hard and unpleasant decisions has compelled the judiciary to become active. When sensitive issues remain unattended to and unresolved people become restive and seek the courts to come across a solution.

Current Affairs Magazine