The Different Facets Of Justice

Justice is treating people as they deserve, and there is far more to this than punishing people.  Regarding punishment, it is easily demonstrated that diverging, arbitrary cultural norms and personal preferences are metaphysically and epistemologically irrelevant to whether obligations exist in the first place, without which there can be no such thing as justice.  Only very specific penalties for specific offenses or a limited range would be just, though; someone's emotional preferences, which are often inconsistent as it is, do not decide if something is just, only how they feel about a given thing, nor does every moral offense necessarily deserve a physical or financial penalty from other people in the first place (not even the Bible prescribes legal punishments for all sins).

How we treat our friends, our spouses or other family members, and strangers is also a matter of justice if obligations exist, though.  Committing to a spouse is a matter of relational justice if marital commitment is obligatory because that means a non-abusive, non-irrationalistic spouse deserves commitment.  One cannot have an obligation to do something without some other being deserving a certain kind of treatment by virtue of partaking in the category of being to which it is a member of.  This is the entire basis of social justice, broader than criminal justice even as it goes right alongside it.  It is logically impossible, if obligations exist, for justice to be exclusively about just punishments one person or God inflicts on another being.

Treating people as they deserve, after all, requires that one not mistreat them in ways that demand the punitive kind of justice to begin with!  If moral obligations exist, then justice involves far more than reacting to specific sins in a specific way.  It by necessity entails not mistreating people in punishment or ignoring or under-punishing their genuine offenses, yes, but it also involves living out all obligations with a broader applicability than criminal justice.  If loving one's fellow humans is an obligation, then it is just to love everyone in all circumstances (though loving someone is not about feeling affection, but wanting to not mistreat them no matter what one subjective wishes otherwise).  If not discriminating against someone in daily life on grounds of race or gender is immoral, then it is just to avoid or reject all such double standards even well before someone commits a moral wrong which needs a just response.

Social justice, the more precise interpersonal justice that is related to marriage or friendship even aside from issues of illicit discrimination like sexism, and even honoring God as an uncaused cause with a moral nature would deserve are all different facets of justice that do not strictly pertain to how people who commit certain acts should or should not be punished.  Yes, without a deity with a moral nature, there cannot be such a thing as moral obligation, and thus there cannot be such a thing as justice, as no one deserves anything one way or another.  How one relates to God himself would also be a component of justice because a deity with a moral nature deserves a particular kind of response, just one that does not involve punishing God for sins, for the uncaused cause cannot sin whether or not it has a moral nature.

In multiple ways, to think that it is even possible for justice to be about nothing more than which actions should be illegal and how all communities should treat those who violate certain moral obligations, neither under-punishing nor over-punishing respectively, is sheer folly.  Criminal justice is in one sense the most important kind because the worst offenses are those that should be punished when someone dehumanizes and abuses others, including the hypocritical abuse of those who have committed acts deserving actual punishment, of course.  To use Biblical examples, lying to a friend about where an item is located is trivial by comparison to raping a person for any reason despite them both being sins, and only one of these universally deserves the punitive reaction of execution (Deuteronomy 22:25-27) according to Mosaic Law.  Justice still is broader than the latter kind of deed because no one can deserve to be mistreated on any level, even when it comes to sins that do not deserve a penalty from fellow humans.