Abstract
While some attribute the first theory of justice to Zarathustra and the Golden Rule, others cite the Code of Hammurabi, containing a long list of grievous acts and appropriate punishment with punishment among equals different than between those unequal. From the Babylonian system of justice to the time of the Greek philosophers, the preoccupation of justice was with revenge and balanced versus unbalanced reciprocity as conveyed in the Homeric epic The Iliad. For Plato, and in ancient times, the objective of justice was to protect the weak and the vulnerable, not to bring about social equality. Unlike philosophers, prophets were given the divine law containing the scriptures with the rules and the criteria to achieve balance.
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Notes
- 1.
Fleischacker, Samuel. A Short History of Distributive Justice. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2004, p. 19.
- 2.
Thomas Burke, Thomas, 2010. “The origin of Social Justice: Taparelli D’Azeglio,” Modern Age, vol. 52, no. 2 (2010): 97–106.
- 3.
Johnson, David. A Brief History of Justice. Massachusetts, USA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011, p. 55.
- 4.
Ibid. p. 57.
- 5.
Fleischacker, p. 11.
- 6.
Fleischacker, Samuel, p. 11.
- 7.
Nussbaum, Martha. Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Memberships. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006, pp. 46–48.
- 8.
Ibid. p. 47.
- 9.
The concept of Axial Age was coined by the German philosopher Karl Jaspers and conveys the idea of a pivotal time and identifies the period of 800–200 BCE as the Axial Age.
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Mirakhor, A., Askari, H. (2019). Introduction. In: Conceptions of Justice from Earliest History to Islam. Political Economy of Islam. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54303-5_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54303-5_1
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