The Problem of Objectivity in Social Justice

Justice is an issue that can be studied in different sciences from different aspects. This paper is concerned with the objectivity or relativity of social justice. The issue is concerned with the foundations and presuppositions of justice, rather than justice itself, and thus, it exhibits the connection between politics and metaphysics on the one hand, reveals a significant anthropological foundation in theories of human sciences, on the other hand. The main conclusions of the paper are as follows: (a) justice is not relative because it comes from the human innate idea (fiṭrat) of perfection and the just legislative divine laws derived from the ontology, (b) theories according to which social justice is relative to different times do not enjoy any convincing arguments, (c) there are theories that claim objectivity about justice, but they fall into the relativistic trap since they do not refer justice to fiṭrat and the ontology, and (d) there are theories that allegedly take justice to be relative, but since they refer it to fiṭrat and the ontology, they have provided a dual-aspect picture of justice in which they accept the relativity of moral oughts while taking the validity of justice to be unchangeable and common.