I. PRINCIPLES OF JUSTICE
The terms most frequently used by lawyers in the praise or
condemnation of law or its administration are the words 'just'
and 'unjust' and very often they write as if the ideas of justice
and morality were coextensive. There are indeed very good
reasons why justice should have a most prominent place in
the criticism of legal arrangements; yet it is important to see
that it is a distinct segment of morality, and that laws and the
administration of laws may have or lack excellences of different
kinds. Very little reflection on some common types of
moral judgment is enough to show this special character of
justice. A man guilty of gross cruelty to his child would often
be judged to have done something morally wrong, bad, or even
wicked or to have disregarded his moral obligation or duty to his child. But it would be strange to criticize his conduct
as unjust. This is not because the word 'unjust' is too weak in
condemnatory force, but because the point of moral criticism
in terms of justice or injustice is usually different from, and
more specific than, the other types of general moral criticism
which are appropriate in this particular case and are expressed
by words like 'wrong', 'bad', or 'wicked'. 'Unjust' would become
appropriate if the man had arbitrarily selected one of
his children for severer punishment than those given to others
guilty of the same fault, or if he had punished the child for
some offence without taking steps to see that he really was the
wrongdoer. Similarly, when we turn from the criticism of
individual conduct to the criticism of law, we might express
our approval of a law requiring parents to send their children
to school, by saying that it was a good law and our disapproval
of a law forbidding the criticism of the Government,
as by calling it a bad law. Such criticisms would not normally
be couched in terms of 'justice' and 'injustice'. just', on the
other hand, would be the appropriate expression of approval
of a law distributing the burden of taxation according to
wealth; so 'unjust' would be appropriate for the expression of
disapproval of a law which forbade coloured people to use the
public means of transport or the parks. That just and unjust
are more specific forms of moral criticism than good and bad
or right and wrong, is plain from the fact that we might
intelligibly claim that a law was good because it was just, or
that it was bad because it was unjust, but not that it was just
because good, or unjust because bad.