Quote:
Originally Posted by Xellos-_^
1. Does Justice exist?
2. What is Justice?
3. Does Fairness exist?
4. What is Fairness?
5. Can Justice be Fair?
6. Should Justice be Fair?
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Justice is the act of balancing. When a crime is committed, the offended seek justice as a "positive" effect to balance out that "negative" effect. Criminals are punished to mitigate the negativity of the crimes they've committed.
Fairness is balance. If something is fair, it's balanced. It's how things are "supposed" to be. If a murderer were "put to justice" and sent to prison for the rest of their life, people would consider that to have been "fair" (assuming that it was deserved and kerblahblahblah). Can it exist, and can something ever be truly fair? Not really, because there's no precedent for what is absolutely fair.
The fairness of justice is arbitrary. It's an opinion. I personally would consider a lot of punishments in the U.S. legal system to be unfair when you look at the socio-economic background and psychological state of offenders of many minor crimes, and sometimes even slightly more serious ones.
Justice should be fair. Justice is just a balancing act, and a subsidiary of fairness in a sense. We know what justice and fairness is, the arbitrary part is whether or not we think that either has been achieved in a given case.