Proceedings of the XXII World Congress of Philosophy

Volume 50, 2008

Social and Political Philosophy

Evolution of the Concept of Justice

The aim of this paper is to analyze what kind of understanding of justice prevails at the beginning of the 21st century. I will shortly show the evolution of justice, concerning on the ancient and Enlightenment understandings of this concept. I shall attempt to justify the thesis that in the contemporary world the factors that play the most important part in the evaluation of justice are aesthetic ones. The essence of the aesthetic evaluation I will describe by refer to the Kant’s “Critique of Judgment” where he analyses the specific character of the judgments of beauty. I will try to show that the characteristics which Kant ascribed to beauty have been transferred by modern philosophy to moral judgments and categories – specially to the judgment concerning justice. Finally I will focus on the contemporary dispute concerning economic human rights – this is a good concrete example for my thesis that today our understanding of justice (or better “social justice”) is based on the aesthetics arguments.