REGARDING THE METHODOLOGICAL PARADIGM OF UNDERSTANDING THE CONCEPT OF JUSTICE

Abstract

The author of the article, having analyzed the definition of the concept of “justice“ in the literature, states that its interpretation is ambiguous. In his opinion, this indicates the lack of a unified methodology in the knowledge of the phenomenon of justice and in the development of its concept. Because of this, it is proposed to choose either one of the already existing approaches, or to define an independent methodological paradigm that will help define the general concept of justice. The last solution to the problem is considered more appropriate, given that most authors either do not consider the question of defining the general concept of justice, but are limited to searching for related or similar concepts of “fairness“, “justice“, “jurisdiction“, etc.; or avoid the definition of this concept at all. The article notes that the definitions of justice proposed by some authors either do not distinguish a common generic feature at all, which would be evidence of a certain unity of their ideas about the general concept of justice as such, or the signs of justice indicated by them do not belong to generic features for justice. In addition, identifying such concepts as “fairness“, “justice“, “jurisdiction“, the authors ignore the question: what is common to all these concepts, what unites them in one row? Instead, when analyzing the ratio of these concepts, as a rule, they try to distinguish only between them without establishing which features are common to them, which leads to their identification or mixing. Thus, the ambiguous interpretation of the terms “fairness“, “justice“ and “jurisdiction“, their confusion in the literature requires a clearer understanding of the concepts denoted by them in terms of what is common to them, their generic feature, in relation to which special species characteristics of each of these phenomena are distinguished, thus forming specific concepts of the latter. According to the author, such a common point which unites the concepts of “jurisdiction“, “justice“ with justice is the concept of “legal activity“. It follows that the concept of legal activity should be considered as a generic concept in relation to the concept of justice, and it should be used to formulate a general definition of justice as such.