Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Any inquiry about “the circumstances of justice” is ultimately one about the scope of justice. It is, in other words, a part of the broader search for the conditions which must obtain for questions of justice to have meaning. Clearly, some such conditions must obtain. To ask whether last year's weather treated my house justly is nonsense, but to ask whether the rich citizens of second‐century Rome treated their poorer fellow citizens justly makes sense. But what, precisely, gives sense to the latter question while denying it to the former? The practical implications of this question may be significant, for it appears that one must determine the conditions of justices in order to confront a host of vexing issues: Can one nation treat another unjustly? Can one generation treat a future generation unjustly? Can people treat animals unjustly? While discussion about the “circumstances of justice” are cut from the larger cloth of the inquiry into the scope of justice, they encompass a narrower range of issues. The phrase “circumstances of justice” refers implicitly to a key set of disputed issues about the conditions of justice, and to specific “circumstances” asserted by the British philosopher David Hume (1711–76). Indeed, it was Hume who coined the phrase “circumstances of justice.” Hume argued that people usually find themselves in circumstances manifesting four general characteristics ... log in or subscribe to read full text