Justice

Justice is a concept involving the fair and moral treatment of all persons, especially as regards societal rules. It is often seen as the continued effort to do what is "right".

Classically, justice was the ability to recognise one's debts and pay them. It was a virtue that encompassed an unwillingness to lie or steal. It was the basis for the code duello. In this view, justice is the opposite of the vice of venality.

In jurisprudence, justice is the obligation that the legal system has toward the individual citizen and the collective society.

Justice (in both senses) is subject to the debate between moral relativism and moral absolutism: Is there an "absolute standard" of justice, under which all behavior should be judged, or does justice have different meanings in different societies? Certainly the term is used in very different ways by different persons: some, for instance, see punishments such as the death penalty appropriate for crimes such as adultery. Others decry such punishments as being fundamentally unjust.

See also: civil justice, criminal justice, ethics, morality, social justice, virtue