What Is Justice? Defining Reward, Punishment, and Society
This essay explores the meaning of justice by drawing on Aristotle's foundational concept, as articulated by Harvard Professor Michael Sandel, that justice concerns how a society distributes honor and recognition. The author expands this definition to include two essential components: the mechanism that determines what individuals deserve and the system that delivers those rewards or punishments. The essay applies this framework to the United States justice system, then critically examines how capitalist values can skew justice in favor of the wealthy. Using Shakespeare's Hamlet as a literary touchstone, the author raises the enduring philosophical question of whether universal, "true" justice exists or whether justice is always relative to a society's prevailing values.
- Defining Justice: Aristotle and Sandel frame justice as distributing honor
- Two Essential Components of Justice: Adjudication mechanism and delivery system defined
- Justice in the United States: U.S. courts and prison system as justice apparatus
- When Money Distorts Justice: Capitalism skews justice toward wealth and power
- Is True Justice Possible?: Open question of universal versus relative justice
✍️ How to write this paper — guide & tools ▾
What makes this paper effective
- The author openly acknowledges intellectual debt to a prior source (Sandel's interview) rather than obscuring it, which demonstrates intellectual honesty and models good academic practice.
- The essay builds its argument incrementally — moving from a concise definition, to a structural unpacking of that definition, to a real-world application, and finally to a broader philosophical challenge — giving the short piece a satisfying arc.
- The use of a Hamlet quotation is well-chosen and directly supports the argument about corruption undermining justice, rather than serving as mere decoration.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates conceptual unpacking: the author takes a compressed authoritative definition (Aristotle via Sandel) and systematically decomposes it into workable parts. By identifying two distinct components — the adjudicating mechanism and the delivery system — the student shows how to move from a cited source toward an original analytical contribution.
Structure breakdown
The essay opens by contextualizing the author's intellectual starting point, then defines justice, expands the definition into two components, applies the framework to the U.S. system, critiques how capitalism distorts that framework using both contemporary observation and a Shakespearean quotation, and closes with an open philosophical question about the existence of universal justice. Five logical sections, tightly linked.
Defining Justice
It is difficult to answer the question "what does justice mean to me?" entirely in one's own words, because exposure to a particularly powerful source can permanently shape how one thinks about a concept. To ignore such an influence, or to pretend it did not happen, would be the equivalent of trying to forget Shakespeare after having just read Hamlet.
What this means, in practice, is that my definition of justice closely follows the one offered by Harvard Professor Michael Sandel in an interview with Charlie Rose in 2009. When asked "what is justice?" Professor Sandel responded by invoking Aristotle, saying that "how a society should distribute honor and recognition is at the heart of justice."
Professor Sandel — following Aristotle — is precisely right. Justice is how a society figures out who deserves what.
Two Essential Components of Justice
I would unpack that concept a little further and suggest that justice involves two essential components. The first is the mechanism that adjudicates who deserves what. The second is the system that ensures whatever one is due — honor, recognition, punishment — is actually delivered. Moreover, justice involves not only rewarding individuals with honor and recognition, but also punishing those who have behaved badly or committed a crime.
To summarize: justice is rendered after a community-generated apparatus determines the reward or punishment one is due, and that reward or punishment is carried out by a community-generated system.
Justice in the United States
To make that definition less abstract, it helps to point to the justice system in the United States. The apparatus that adjudicates who deserves what — in the context of those facing criminal charges — is the U.S. court system. The system that delivers the punishment is the broader legal system and, by extension, the prison system.
Create your account
Always verify citation format against your institution’s current style guide requirements.