The Semantics of Justice in the Domain of Society

In spite of a general commonsensical understanding of justice, the plurality of the considerations that are involved in its social applications has subjected the air of justice discourse to confusion. The question is whether the term justice is used univocally in such various domains as law, politics, and economy and whether semantic patterns of justice such as granting right, observing competency, equality, impartiality and balance are reducible to a single comprehensive pattern. No doubt there are opposing views on principles of justice and identification of its instances but question is whether all these themes under the title of justice deal with one and single problem and whether one can speak of the coherent ideas when they are based on different ideological principles and various epistemic foundations. The present article is to show that before entering ideological disputes on theories of justice a semantic analysis of social justice can provide answers to aforementioned questions and pave the way for adopting more reasonable standpoint among rival theories.