Discourses of Justice - Indicators of Crises?

There have been numerous attempts to trace a historical, if not evolutionary, line through the development of discourses on justice. As impressive as this tradition is, the everyday use and labeling of people, actions, and structures as ‘just’ or ‘unjust’ seems to us to be far removed from it. In political discourse, from left to right, people make use of the semantics of justice, and in another sphere, a pluralistic use is emerging, namely in the world religions. Social developments seem to be characterised precisely by the fact that they claim to be evaluated from the perspective of ‘just/unjust’: this applies to the gender debate, the discourse on climate justice, intergenerational justice, questions of restorative justice, memory justice, or epistemic justice and ontological injustice in the religious discourse of Catholicism. At the same time, the spread of the vocabulary of justice seems to be both an expression and a harbinger of a crisis in the sphere, because if the distribution of goods, access to status, the use of essential goods, access to educational places of remembrance, and so on are perceived as ‘unjust’, then this indicates a ‘crisis’ in which a sphere can develop in a more just or more unjust direction.