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Originally Posted by asaris
justice requires that good be rewarded and evil punished.
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This relies solely on the metaphor of a strong father figure as the determiner of justice. The concept of justice in this manner means that people naturally don't know the difference between good and evil, or would naturally choose evil. Then, when doing evil, they must be punished and that punishment will be transposed on them from the higher figure.
Of course, it is easy to see how the strong father figure metaphor looks exactly like the metaphor of God being the ultimate masculine authority figure. The idea of punishment as justice is problematic for several reasons: 1) How do you know if people are intentionally choosing evil? 2) How do you decide how to punish someone if punishments are variable in length and severity? 3) Punishment does not necessarily instill a new sense of morality in those punished. 4) Punishment is reactive rather than proactive. 5) Punishment tends to lead to resentment, and can actually lead to more evil than less. There are even more problems with this model, but I'll stop for now.
An alternative form of justice comes from the community model/metaphor. It simply states that justice is determined by what is best for the community. It values each person justice is determined on individual bases taking into account the situations; not on a transcendent purveyor of justice. In this model, people are not naturally evil and they are capable and willing to be positive, contributing members of society if they are given a chance to do so. To create justice, then, society must work to remove the conditions that creates evil (such as poverty, neglect, pollution, individual cases within families the creates negative cycles, etc.). The advantage of this model is that it is pro-active and that it sees evil as not being beyond reason. Justice, then, is focused on giving people that do evil things a chance for rehabilitation and retribution if at all possible, within the main goal of protecting society. Imprisonment is then a necessary part of society for those that cannot be rehabilitation, however, this does not mean that being in prison is supposed to be an awful experience.
I think that everyone has access to these two archetypes that gives us a framework to understand justice. I think our society is dominated by the first metaphor, and I certainly think that, at the least, more attention should be spend on the other model.