Justice is closely connected to respect for rights, it is giving people what they deserve. Etymologically, the word which corresponds to Just; points to the connection of the positive law, or that which was in most cases the primitive form of law – authoritative custom. Thus Justum is a form of Jussum, that which has been ordered. Originally, it meant only the mode of doing things, but it later came to mean the prescribed manner in which the recognized authorities: patriarchal, judicial, or political would enforce their law. According to Ryan (1995), the primitive element in the formation of the notion of justice was conformity to the law. It constituted the entire idea among the Hebrews, up to the birth of Christianity. As might be expected in the case of a people whose laws attempted to embrace all subjects on which precepts were required and who believed those laws to be a direct emanation from the Supreme Being, they did believe in the justice of the law.
Other nations, like Romans and Greeks, who knew their law had been made originally and still being made by men, were not afraid to admit that those men might make bad laws, might do by the law, the same things, and from the same motives, which if done by individuals without sanction of law, would be called
unjust. Hence the same sentiment of injustice came to be attached, not to all violations of the law, but only violations of such laws as ought to exist. Including such ought to exist but do not; and to laws themselves if supposed to be contrary to what ought to be the law. Therefore, the idea of legal constraint is still the generating idea of the notion of justice, though undergoing several transformation before that notion, as it exist in an advance state of society becomes complete.
The Greek Political theory and Roman law had sophisticated ideas about justice in its various aspects, but did not embrace our conception of individual rights. However, Tuck (1979) stressed that the subjective understanding of rights, whereby the right-holder may stand on his rights, or not as he chooses, was not a Roman law. Neither Plato nor Aristotle held that justice was a matter of individual rights. In the Republic, Plato (429 – 347 B.C.E.) confided the power to the Guardians and Auxiliaries. And his insistence on an aristocratic form of government may seem to imply that only philosophers are entitled to rule, or have a right to govern. According to platonic thought, States need good governors who can impose laws within the realm of justice. In the Republic Plato (429-347 B.C.E) describes the nature and origin of justice, as what stands half-way between the best thing of all, to do wrong with impunity, and the worst, which is to suffer wrong without the power to retaliate. In discussion with Glaucon, Plato held that what people say to do wrong is, in itself, a desirable thing; on the other hand, it is not at all desirable to suffer wrong, and the hurt to the suffer outweighs the advantage to the doer. Consequently, when men had a taste of both, those who
have no power to seize the advantage and escape the harm, decide that they would be better off it, and they made a compact neither to do wrong, nor to suffer from it. Hence they began to make laws and covenants with one another, and whatever the law prescribed; they called lawful and right. That is, what is right or justice is, and how it came into existence. Hence Justice is accepted as a compromise, and valued, not as good in itself, but for lack of power to do wrong.
Nonetheless, Aristotle (384 – 322 B.C.E.) in Nicomachean Ethics book 5 allocates authority to classes and individuals according to a rational, and morally acceptable scheme, according to justice, but not to protect individual. But Ryan (1995) stressed that we do not call anything happening to the individual wrong, unless we mean to imply that a person ought to be punished in some way. Or other by doing it, if not by law, by the opinion of his fellow creatures: if not by opinion of his fellow human beings, but by reproaches of his own conscience. Thus, the real turning point of the distinction between morality and simple expediency came into existence. However, it is but of the notion of duty in every one of its forms that a person may rightfully be compelled to fulfill it. By duty, I mean a thing which may be exacted from a person, as one exacts a debt. Reasons of prudence, or the interest of other people, may militate against actually exacting it, but a person himself, is clearly understood would not be entitled to complain.
David Hume (1711 – 1776) in An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, stressed that justice is artificial virtue, which produces approbation by a human
contrivance; he held that external actions are praised only because they are signs of virtuous motives. He argued that no action can be virtuous unless there are in men some motives which produces it, other than the desire to do it is virtuous. Though an action may be done from a sense of duty alone, there must be some motives which usually prompts men to perform actions of a kind. Or a kind of action would not be a duty where justice is concerned, however, there is no motive preceding the regard for justice itself, which by prompting men to perform just actions makes just actions meritorious.
Temkin (1995) also believed that there is intimate connection between the notions of justice and equality. The idea of equality is properly regarded as one aspect of the wider idea of justice. He stressed that the core of the egalitarian concern is the view that at least in some cases it is unjust for some to be worse off than others through no fault of their own.
It is therefore clear that, whether the injustice consist in depriving a person of a possession, or in breaking faith with him, or in not treating him worse off than he deserves. Or as worse than what other people who have greater claims, in each case the suppositions implies two things. One, a wrong done, and secondly, some assignable person who is wronged. Injustice may also be done by treating a person better than others, but the wrong here is to his competitors, who are also assignable persons. Justice therefore implies something which is not only right to do, and wrong not to do, but which some individual person can claim from us; as his moral
right. No one has a moral right to our generosity or beneficence, because we are not morally bound to practice such virtues towards any given individual.
3.3. Approaches to the Concept of Justice