Justice - rendering to each person what is owed to them.
It's obvious that we will very often disagree about 'what is owed', but doesn't our passionate disagreement in this case show that (1) we agree that practicing justice is good and (2) we are closely aligned on the existence of this thing called 'justice'?
For instance, in climate justice we might say that we owe something to all of the people who are young now or haven't been born yet. In social justice you might owe something to a whole group of people. Just because they're groups doesn't mean the individual people that comprise the group dissolve into an abstract concept, even if that's how it might seem in our minds.
In some cases maybe the definition is too narrow because it depends on what is or isn't a "person" which we might define too narrowly. Do we owe things to animals? I'd say so, and I think most people would agree, depending on the animal. Do we owe things to plants? Maybe. Do we owe things to the planet Mars, assuming it's entirely devoid of life? I don't know, but I think it would offend people's sensibilities if we were to dump toxic waste all over it's surface, even if we were sure that humans are never going to settle there or use any of its resources. There's a view of climate justice that we owe things to the Earth directly rather than (or in addition to) owing something to the people that live there or will live there.
I shared an argument above for why it can be viewed as a universal and judging by your comment above you are somewhat skeptical of this claim.
If we shift the discussion to allow conceptions of 'justice' that move away from the classical tradition and include modern ideas like 'climate' justice or 'social' justice, I will revert to agreeing with your skepticism.
I don't think anyone can plausibly claim that these more marxist-oriented modern definitions are universals.
This is extremely subjective.
Justice does not have to be cogent, which is defined as "(of an argument or case) clear, logical, and convincing.". There were and are justice systems that leave out one or more of these ingredients to some extent. Some leave out some logic by presuming the existence of a supernatural being. Some are more authoritarian and not very convincing.
What do you mean by that?
So does the definition of justice.
> vigilante justice
Except 'vigilante justice' and 'justice' are concepts that have little to do with each other. You might as well be talking about the 'de facto law' (like for instance the "law" enforced by the local mafia) vs. the 'de jure law' here.
That depends on how well different people's definitions of justice line up. There are many things that vigilantes can enforce pretty well.
> You might as well be talking about the 'de facto law' (like for instance the "law" enforced by the local mafia) vs. the 'de jure law' here.
Sure, why not? Mafia law is often not justice, but I think it qualifies as law where sufficiently powerful. You seem to think this argument debunks itself?
If reputation and peer pressure scaled to group sizes bigger than Dunbar's number (i.e. about a hundred or so) then we probably wouldn't need laws at all.
I suppose you one might say that social expectations are just another kind of law, in which case, yeah it's hard to imagine any group of people without some kind of expectations of how each other will behave. That's kind of the basis of human relationships.
* A society of one.
* A society of one family isolated in nature, where each member is allowed to express their peculiarities and eccentricities, but never do each other any harm - not because of established rules, but because they truly love and care of each other.
The second example is virtually unreal (and even expressions of 'love' and 'care' can be harmful).