·        Justice is usually said to be the property of a distribution of something.

·        Some form of social justice is the ultimate aim of most ideologies. It operates in the context of scarce goods which have to be appropriately distributed.

·        Plato thought of justice as what signified a ‘just proportion’ between the various parts of society.

·        Aristotle proposed a definition which rested on an individual.

·        Conservatives would regard justice as a hierarchical distribution of goods and privileges.

·        Liberals would regard it just to distribute according to merit.

·        Socialists strive for justice based on need and fundamental equality.

·        Justice is a property of situations or outcomes, brought about by human action.

·        Equal distribution is where each person gets an equal quantity of a good, irrespective of their personal characteristics. The outcome of an equal distribution can therefore be specified in advance.

·        Unequal distribution implies some individuals are favoured and privileged. This takes place according to some criterion which relates the goods distributed to special characteristics of their recipients.

·        Sub-species of unequal distribution is random distribution, where no criteria is involved. Outcome is not predictable in advance.

·        Selective and random methods produce unequal distributions.

·        Three major criteria chosen as appropriate for determining a distribution, and thus justice , are merit, need and equality.

·        Since 18^th century equality has been a fundamental presumption in theories of justice. All individuals are equally deserving unless, or until, proved otherwise.

·        Equality before the law gradually became a tenet of legal systems, replacing the feudal system in which there were different grades of citizens.

·        A belief in equality doesn’t necessarily lead to an egalitarian theory of social justice, since the conviction that people are in some basic and abstract sense equal can co-exist with the principle that because people also differ in certain ways they merit different treatment.

·        Aristotle maintained that it is as unjust to treat unequals equally as to treat equals unequally.

·        Some notion of equal treatment must reside in every theory of justice.

·        Theories of justice based on merit or desert distinguish people and justify differential rewards.

·        The idea that social justice is based on merit, measured by contribution, is the mainstay of the liberal theory of justice.

·        Two broad categories: those which hold that moral worth or intrinsic virtues and talents deserve reward, and those which argue that reward should be linked to an individual’s contribution to society.

·        Historically, the idea of merit played a progressive role.

·        A theory of justice based on need presupposes everyone’s humanity and equal right to have his/her needs satisfied irrespective of his/her merits, as is suggested by the socialists.

·        Justice is intimately connected with equality in the sense of ‘fair and non-arbitrary treatment of equals’, although it does not necessarily require a substantive equality between individuals.

·        Equality is also the first assumption of morality. We act morally towards others because we assume that they are equally sensitive, equally vulnerable and equally worthy of respect in some formal or abstract sense. If a certain group are defined as inferior, the requirement to act morally towards them is annulled.

·        This has often happened with genocide, and groups have been redefined as sub-human – unworthy of moral respect.

·        The natural and artificial inequalities which exist outside philosopher’s models demand a justice based on carefully structured unequal treatment, devised so as to remove injustices and to compensate for natural disadvantages.  

·        Approximate natural equality leads, paradoxically, to a war of all against all and the subjection of some by others. This is because if two men both want the same thing which is scarce, and both have the same ‘equality of hope’ of attaining it, they become enemies. (Hobbes).

·        Desire for distinction causes equality in societies to disappear. (Rousseau). He suggests that inequality is not natural, but is imposed by circumstance and, more precisely, by society.

·        Rousseau’s hypothesis is that men are equal in a pre-social state, or at birth.