A Brief History of the concepts of Justice and Fairness

The concepts of justice and fairness, although it seems strange and illogical, are instilled in us. They are innate feelings as well as moral principles (love of family, not killing, attachment to homeland etc.) and these feelings can be developed or honed but cannot be learnt. These are a priori attitudes we are born with and these attitudes, among other things, make us conscious and morally developed human beings.

Justice and fairness require the existence of interpersonal relations i.e. they can be expressed only in relation of at least two human beings so that we may say that the aforementioned concepts developed and evolved alongside with the awakening of man and are associated with the development of human society. Thus we may find the legends of a just ruler of his tribe, we read about the righteous kings...

The definition, systematization, strict defining of the concepts of justice and fairness as well as the idea of ​​inseparable relation of justice and law was given by the ancient philosophical tradition. Not long afterwards, scholastic age overwhelmed them with the idea of ​​God, which meant that God is in charge of everything moral and just inside and outside of man. The notion of the absolute apparently solved the issue of genetic justice.

With the progressive advancement of human researching but also with the development of natural and social sciences, the concepts of justice and fairness once again became socially current and implemented in the foundations of natural law, such as the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen and the American Declaration of Independence that are based on the ideas of natural rights, therefore implicating the elements of doctrines of the ancient concept of justice. Assuredly, it is debatable to what extent this was the intention of the legislator and whether they really had in mind these concepts when writing these Codes. Yet there are also more illustrative examples such as the Swiss Civil Code, which in its first article contains the authorization given to the judge to judge by the principles of fairness. This interesting provision on judicial possibility of the use of fairness, if there is a legal void, was directly derived from Aristotle's reflection about fairness as a corrective of the positive law.

In modern times there appear to be a lot of interpretations and criticisms that are mainly attempts to supplement the existing theories or the emergence of new concepts such as Pure Theory of Law by Hans Kelsen, who sought to separate law from philosophy, sociology and axiology.

Nevertheless, the conclusion is that all these different and conflicting opinions only upgrade the ancient foundations and that the subsequent searches for a clearer outline of the concepts of justice and fairness are only reconstruction of the already built base called the antique.