What is Justice? How do we define it?

Where do your personal beliefs about justice come from?

Where do American beliefs on justice come from?

Hammurabi's Code - first codified laws from Sumeria

Socratic ideal - 

Confucian code of justice - justice as a tool to maintain authority/stability for society 

family
religion

education

Junior Reading Assignments:

Juniors:read Plato's Crito excerpt for tomorrow (US History Reading Packet due over next couple of weeks)

upcoming novel: Vonnegut's God Bless You Mr. Rosewater

from Amazon.com

God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater is a comic masterpiece.  Eliot Rosewater, drunk, volunteer fireman, and president of the fabulously rich Rosewater foundation, is about to attempt a noble experiment with human nature... with a little help from writer Kilgore Trout.  The result is Vonnegut's funniest satire, an etched-in-acid portrayal of the greed, hypocrisy, and follies of the flesh we are all heir to.

Senior reading:  "The Case for Moral Relativism".   

definition from The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: "The term ‘moral relativism’ is understood in a variety of ways. Most often it is associated with an empirical thesis that there are deep and widespread moral disagreements and a meta-ethical thesis that the truth or justification of moral judgments is not absolute, but relative to some group of persons. Sometimes ‘moral relativism’ is connected with a normative position about how we ought to think about or act towards those with whom we morally disagree, most commonly that we should tolerate them."

Debate! Where do you stand on moral relativism?