Justice in Ancient and Modern Literature :: essays research papers

  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  The first blow of the machete landed on the boy. â€Å"My father, they have killed me!† he cried as he ran towards him. The father then drew his own machete and â€Å"cut him down.† In Achebe’s novel, Things Fall Apart, this was justice. The boy was from another tribe, a payment for a misdeed, and his life was theirs to do with as they pleased. Justice is something that all of us have a notion of. However we differ in our implementation of it, we all know when it’s been violated. Many of the seeds of our modern idea of justice have existed for millennia. Those seeds comprise two basic forms based on Socratic, Platonic and Aristotelian thought – Should justice be rooted on a higher ideal or is justice primarily something established by us in the here and now? For one justice my involve taking the life of another as just recompense for previous crimes while another my feel that standing for what is just would be something worth gi ving one’s own life for. And sadly one may put off embracing justice to the detriment of his own life and the lives of those around him.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Plato, one of the great philosophers of the ancient world, approached the subject of justice by believing that an ideal form of it exists. He might say that it is something outside of ourselves that we strive to attain. He shows how Socrates (his teacher) would choose not to bow to popular opinion just because it was the majority view. â€Å"In questions of justice and injustice, and of the base and the honorable, and of good and evil†¦ought we to follow the opinion of the many?† (Plato: Crito) He mentions how others feel that they do not hold to a higher ideal but that â€Å"political decisions [are] supreme.† And he shows the Athenian view of the inequality of different groups of people.  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã¢â‚¬Å"Can you deny that you are our child and our slave†¦? And if this be so do you think that your rights are on a level with ours?†   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Plato and Socrates both felt that a truth that one holds should be defended and upheld regardless of the personal cost in doing so. In the end Socrates concluded that it was better to die for the truth he believed in than to run from its consequences and be labeled hypocritical. He might use the phrase: Do what’s right, regardless of the price.