Justice, Injustice, Etc.

I am reading through selections from The Great Books of the Western World, and I started in on Plato's Republic. I've read this before and thumbed through the later parts of it recently for a research paper in my education coursework. So I started to reread it and found some of my earlier notes from 1997 and 1999.

One of the first questions posed in the Republic is what is a "Just Man?" Polymarchus states that Justice is the art which delivers good to the friend and evil to the enemy. This is dismissed as being useless in peace-time, and Justice is thought of to be useful all the time.

The next defintion goes along the lines of "the Just man cannot injure another person, because by injuring another you make him less just." (Okay, I'm paraphrasing a lot here, but that's my gist of it.) I fell asleep thinking about this and I think I have a few ideas.

Injustice is doing potentially intentional harm to another person. It is sometimes easier to define an abstract concept like "Justice" by chipping away at what it is not. If Justice is merely the opposite of Injustice, then Justice involves intentionally working not to harm other people. This may be the best working definition I can get right now.

If a person does something to benefit himself but potentially could bring injury to others, and he does not care about the effect it has on others, then he is motivated by Greed, which is bad in my book.

If another person does the same thing to benefit himself and works to avoid injury to others, then he is motivated by Justice.

If he benefits himself, works to avoid injury to others and still brings injury to one person, then he is still motivated by Justice but he did not accomplish Justice. If he makes amends and helps to repair the injury, then he comes closer to accomplishing Justice.

If a person works to benefit himself and finds that his actions will cause injury and brings his case to the potential injured, and the potential injured approves of the action, then the man has accomplished Justice. There is nothing in my working definition of Justice that states that a person must avoid self-injury.

All this seems to be missing something, however. First of all there is nothing Moral about this. Yes, it is moral to be just, but I can't say that being Just (in this definition) encompasses being Moral. Morality must have something more.

For instance, Christians have the 10 commandments, which tell us what NOT to do. We should NOT covet, murder, disrepect, etc. Okay, "Honor thy father and mother" does tell us what we should do, but it usually interpreted as "do this and you won't honor your parents." Part of Jesus' Sermon on the Mount was turning the 10 Commandments around: Do more than simply not murder, do things that enhance and value Life.

My working definition of Justice is more of the "don't do this" kind of guidepost. It tells me what to avoid, not necessarily what to do. At least, actions are motivated to avoid injury to others. Morality, I think, will be (in this fledging system) a guidepost of where to go and how to act. That is how Morality is higher than Justice, and I can say that Injustice and Greed are Immoral.

I'll return to this later.