Justice Flashcards
Lord Wright defines it as “the guiding principle of a judge in deciding cases is to do justice. That is justice according to the law, but still justice”.
This refers to a more practical definition of what justice means in our modern world and to a professional.
The impact of this justice is that it may provide compensation for those wronged as well as deterring the committing of an offence.
Justice in our society means that all people, whatever the offence is, are granted the right to a fair trial and as fair an outcome as possible.
Some potential issues within justice come in the form of its great subjectivity, where one person may deem something as “unjust”, another may decide the opposite viewpoint.
One example of this is Nettleship v Weston (1971), a landmark case in that it holds a learner driver to the standards of a reasonable fully qualified driver.
One alternative idea of justice is the view of Jeremy Bentham and his ideology of utilitarianism. This would suggest that an act should be considered as just if it increases the total sum of human happiness, meaning that as long as the positives of the act are greater than the negatives, the act is just.
Another, highly contrasting, view is that of Karl Marx who views all the laws of capitalism as unjust, relating mainly to the system in which certain people control a significant portion more of the goods and wealth of a society.
Overall, justice is a complex idea which relies on subjective viewpoints on what a person holds to be morally right and a person’s own subjective view on what fairness is.
The main issue with justice is its great subjectivity, especially arising with the various issues to do with sentencing, as various people would hold a variety of opinions over the correct sentence to give to those guilty of criminal acts.
