Rule justice

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The rule of justice and legal justice ( iustitia legalis ) is a concept of justice, which as a criterion for assessing the state of a society as justice or injustice considers the laws. At least in modern approaches, it is required that all members of society are actually subject to the same rules . The economist Friedrich August von Hayek contrasted the rule with the fairness of results and preferred the former.

Regular justice as traditional legal justice alongside other types of justice

Legal justice can be determined in different ways. Aristotle understands the state laws as her formal object , Thomas Aquinas, in part, the common good . Legal justice is a virtue for Thomas and is determined by natural law ; it is general justice, in contrast to which distributive justice (distributive G.) and exchange justice (commutative G.) are distinguished as particular types of justice. In addition, fair participation ( iustitia contributiva ) is traditionally required as a further additional condition for ensuring social justice .

Regular justice as procedural justice

Some modern theories of justice (as against, for example, Thomas) who iustitia legalis with the so-called procedural justice ( procedural justice identified).

John Rawls, for example, distinguishes three types of procedural justice in his theory of justice :

perfect procedural justice
The procedures are designed in such a way that they guarantee a fair result (as is only conceivable in simple or idealized cases; the standard example is dividing a cake into equal pieces, with the person dividing the cake receiving their piece last).
imperfect procedural justice
There is no procedure that with certainty a fair result causes (as for example in court hearings is virtually unavoidable).
pure procedural justice
While in both of the aforementioned cases there is an independent criterion which allows checking whether the result is fair or not, this is excluded in this case; the process is itself considered to be fair, without this being constituted by the fairness of the result (as, for example, when everyone adheres to the rules of a card game ).

The notion of purely procedural justice is the foundation of Rawls' theory. Robert Nozick believes that only procedural justice can provide a plausible foundation for moral appeals .

Specifically, in addition to equality before the law, they usually also demand impartiality of the courts and fair legal finding as necessary conditions for a procedural social system .

Regular justice in liberal social philosophy

Similar to Hayek, who placed rule justice above results, arguments are still being made in liberal social philosophy today . The Friedrich Naumann Foundation, for example, postulates in its statutes: “Liberal politics want to lay down rules that apply to everyone, but leave the individual free to decide . She doesn't want to fix a certain result from the outset: So she wants regularity because there cannot be fair results. "

literature

  • John Rawls : A Theory of Justice , Frankfurt / M. 1976.
  • Jürgen Habermas : factuality and validity , Frankfurt / M. 1992, especially p. 292 ff.
  • Thomas Pogge: Justice , in: Donald M. Borchert (ed.): Encyclopedia of Philosophy , 2nd Edition 2005, Vol. 4, pp. 862-870, especially p. 864.
  • C. Lafont: Procedural Justice? Implications of the Rawls-Habermas Debate for Discourse Ethics , in: Philosophy and Social Criticism 29 (2003), pp. 167-85.
  • David M. Anderson: Reconstructing the Justice Dispute in America , Diss. Michigan 1990

Individual evidence

  1. Nicomachean Ethics , 3.5, 1130b;
  2. .. See cast Summa , II-II, 57-79; Michael Schramm: Gerechtigkeit , in: LThK 3, Vol. 4, pp. 498-500.
  3. See John Rawls : Theory of Justice , 1971, p. 86.
  4. ^ John Rawls, Theory of Justice , 1971, p. 136.
  5. ^ Robert Nozick: Anarchy, State and Utopia . New York: Basic Books 1974, passim.
  6. Friedrich Naumann Foundation:  ( page no longer available , search in web archives ).@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / www.fnst-freiheit.org

Web links

  • Axel Tschentscher: Introduction to: procedural theories of justice, rational decision-making, discourse ethics and procedural law, Baden-Baden 2000.