A path through philosophy
What is a just society?
What makes political power legitimate, and a society just?
From the ancient city to the modern state, philosophers have asked what justice requires and who should rule. Follow the argument from Plato's ideal republic to today's debates over rights, equality, and power.
- 1
Justice is harmony: each part of the soul and each class of the city doing its proper work, ruled by those who know the good.
- 2
- 3
In China: impartial care for all, judged by benefit to the people — against partiality, luxury, and wasteful war.
- 4
The Legalist answer: order comes not from virtue but from clear, strictly enforced law and the ruler's power.
Responding tothe Confucians
- 5
Earthly justice is always imperfect; true justice belongs to the City of God, not the earthly city of self-love.
- 6
Just law is rooted in natural law — reason's share in the eternal law — and an unjust law is no true law at all.
- 7
Sets ethics aside to ask how power is really won and kept; a ruler must sometimes do what private morality forbids.
Responding tothe idealists' imagined republics
- 8
Justice and the state arise by contract out of the war of all against all; only an absolute sovereign secures peace.
Responding tothe state of nature
- 9
Government exists by consent to protect natural rights — life, liberty, property — and may be overthrown if it betrays them.
Responding toHobbes' absolutism
- 10
Legitimate authority is the people governing themselves by the general will; 'man is born free, yet everywhere in chains'.
Responding toLocke
- 11
Justice must include women: deny them education and rights and you deny half of humanity its freedom.
Responding tothe Enlightenment's blind spot
- 12
Liberty is at the heart of a just society: power over the individual is justified only to prevent harm to others.
- 13
Political rights ring hollow while the economy exploits: real emancipation requires abolishing class domination.
Responding toliberal rights
- 14
Justice as fairness: choose the rules behind a 'veil of ignorance', securing equal liberty and helping the least advantaged.
Responding toutilitarianism
- 15
For the colonized, justice means decolonization — reclaiming humanity and land from a violent order built on race.
Responding toEuropean claims to universal justice
- 16
Measure justice by real human capabilities — what each person is actually able to do and to be.
Responding toRawls