Oh, you mean before Aristotle? Yeah, those Orwellian Greeks... and Buddhists, and Muslims and that damned Confucius. Plato should have died with Socrates, I agree. Down with the gadflies!
The word "justice" comes from Latin, not Greek.
> Muslims
Muslims have their own vocabulary for these things, related words include "Adl", "Insaf", and "Qada".
And here I thought it came from English and that the Romans would have used iūstitia for the same universally debated concept. You learn something new every day.
The definition of justice has been debated since at least Plato's "Republic" more than 2000 years ago.
Citation needed.
That isn't what that word has meant since, at least, Socrates. Read academic works of jurisprudence from the past 3 centuries, and you'll see that most people are concerned with defining "law" as subsidiary to "justice", just as Rawls does, rather than the other way around (as suggested by you).
Rawls didn't suddenly come out of nowhere and change the game completely. He's just another voice in a conversation that is thousands of years old. Namely, how can we say with confidence that a set of laws is just?
You may not like his answer, but Rawls is certainly not the first (nor the last) to pose the question.
Idk, nobody is going to be talking about these people in a year, but it is very interesting to see this now.
But maybe if you're very charitable, you could see that as steelmanning the contemporary positions, instead of merely assigning blame.
This actually sounds like the exact opposite of Wittgenstein, who argued against the idea of a "private language".
No.