Author Description

"The idea of justice is perennial and the great classical definitions of it, by Plato and Aristotle and even Confucius and Lao-Tse, are as relevant to us today as when they were first formulated. In the second half of the twentieth century, justice is still the subject of a fundamental debate, one which centres on the tensions between liberty, justice and equality, between formal justice and social justice, between legal impartiality and benevolent discrimination. In this volume, leading social and legal philosophers examine the meaning of justice and the difficulties associated with the search for justice. Eugene Kamenka argues that the idea of justice necessarily contains a reference to historically conditioned social attitudes and beliefs over which people and ideologies conflict. John Passmore distinguishes different and opposing conceptions of justice - civil justice and communal justice, formal justice and social or even cosmic justice. Brian Barry explores the limitations of the notion of justice as reciprocity and suggests a new approach to the problems of international and intergenerational justice. Alice Erh-Soon Tay shows how the sense of justice in the Common Law is both flexible and responsive to social change, as well as sustaining a creative tradition of fair dealing. Julius Stone rebuts the tendency to reinterpret justice as equality and reasons that the law must discriminate. Finally, the Marxist angle on justice and on equality is presented by Wiesław Lang, a leading Polish theoretician, and by Ferenc Feher and Agnes Heller, two important dissident Marxists who recently left Hungary"--Back cover.