Justice as the Virtue of “No Unacceptable Harm to the Human”

Abstract

Through a semantic analysis of such common words as “good,” “right,” and “rights,” this article tries to argue that “justice” as a value-term basically means “no unacceptable harm to the human” or “respecting the deserved rights of the human” in the meta-ethical sense. In real life, then, the becoming of universal justice as an authentic moral virtue depends first and foremost upon the concrete and dynamic cultivation of such a universalistic ethical attitude: regarding neither merely oneself nor some persons specially related to oneself, but everyone as the “human,” and valuing all of them morally important and dignified so as not to do morally unacceptable harm to them, but to respect their deserved rights.