The Notions of Justice in Islamic Ethics

A key concept of various humanities such as social sciences, politics and ethics is ‘justice’. There are difference notions and definitions for this term. In this paper, I shall investigate the notions of justice in Islamic ethics. Following Plato, some Islamic philosophers developed a psychological notion of justice in terms of harmony among faculties of the soul. On this notion, justice is a general, comprehensive virtue of the soul that results from three virtues of the soul—wisdom, courage and moderation. Some others followed Aristotle and defined justice as average or intermediary between doing injustice and tolerating injustice: a just distribution of properties and facilities between others. Some others define justice as a virtue of practical reason whose moderateness leads to the moderateness of all faculties. Finally, it seems that a comprehensive definition of justice is in terms of giving everything its appropriate position. It is to this definition that all other definitions such as the psychological, social and political ones refer. Also in this paper I have dealt with other issues regarding justice such as the determination of vice in contrast with justice, types of virtues that are included in justice, and the simplicity or complexity of this notion in Islamic ethics.