"Take two diffrent concepts of Justice from the lecture series and explore their key features"

Although Restorative Justice is a strong concept of justice and has proven to be successful it also has its limitations. Restorative Justice practices rely in large part upon voluntary cooperation. if one party is not willing to participate, the range of options is reduced. If neither party is willing, there is no option but to let formal justice being wholly replaced. Traditional justice forms will remain to deal with cases where restorative justice in inapplicable because of the circumstances, or fails through lack of cooperation or through failure to come to a mutually acceptable resloution. Another limitation to any practice which attempts to involve communities is the available level of resources and skills. communities are not as integrated as they once were. There is a greater emphasis on individual privacy and autonomy, and major social divides occur between cultures and age groups. A third related, limitation for restorative justice is the existence of social injustice and inequality in and between communities. while probelms such as these continue the degree to which communities can be supportive, caring and controlling is restricted. If restorative justice involves the community as a major player, there needs to be a community. A concern of restorative justice is the breakdown of the barriers betwen legal processes and community action. It is this aspect of restorative justice which raises a considerable number of fears and concerns around justice, ethics and fairness. Victims have a right of justice, and a right not to be further damaged by the processes of dealing with the offence. Their right to justice includes the expectation that offenders will appropiately dealt with and the wrongness of their actions condemned. Nevertheless, there is also the possibility of this not happening, and they may feel aggrieved at the outcome.

Restorative justice is rich, complex and multidimensional. It must, at some point, involve reconcilation as much as it involves both reparation and the slow but steady transformation of individuals and communities. "The primary site or restorative justice is not an adversarial court of law, a prison cell, a boot camp, or an execution chamber. It involves a mediated encounter between those directly involved in or effected by the crime: the victim, the ofender, family members and the community representatives( Brooks,Derek,Evaluating restorativejustice programs)

The second concept of justice i am going to explore is Distributive Justice. Principles of distributive justice are normative principles designed to allocate goods in limited supply relative to demand. The principles vary in numerous dimensions. They vary in what goods are subjectto distribution(income, wealth, opportunities etc.); on the nature of subjects of the  distribution(natural persons,groups of persons, reference classes, etc); and on what basis the goods should be distributed. One of the simplest principles of distributive justice is that of strict or radical equality. The principle says that every person should have the same level of material goods and services. Robert Norick explains distributive justice as not being a neutral one." hering the term 'distribution'most people presume that some thing or mechanism uses some principle or criterion to give out a supply of things"(Nozick. R.1974,p527) but the most widely discussed theory of distributive justice in the past three decades has been that proposed by John Rawls in a theory of justice(Rawls1971). Rawls proposes the following two principles of justice:

1. Each person has an equal claim to fully adequate scheme of equal basic rights, which scheme is compatible with the same scheme for all;and in this scheme the equal political liberties, and only those liberties, are to be guaranteed their fair value.

2. Socialand economic inequalities are to satisfy two conditions;(a) They are to be attached to positions and offices open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity;and (b), theyare to be to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged members of society.(Rawls 1993)

These principles apply to the basic structure of society. They are to govern the assignment of rights and duties and to regulate the distribution of social and economic advantages. These principles are to regulate all further agreements; they specify the kinds of social cooperation that can be entered into and the forms of goverment that can be established. "This way of regarding the principle of justice i shall call  justice as fairness"(Rawls1993). Rawls applies the term of Fairness both to the content  of his conception and to his method of reaching it. The method is a form of social contract and that is why Rawls says fairness is expressed by the ideas of the social contract.He imagines people considering together what basic principles they should agree upon for the ordering of social institutions. " in Justice as fairness' he simply asks us to suppose that they approach the task from a standpoint of rational self-interest, his purpose being to find an alternative form of judgement to simple intuition, which is unlikely to yield a unanimous view.(D.D.Raphael.1981,p197)

The main moral motivation for the difference principle is similar to that for strict equality: equal respect for persons. The ovrwhelming opinion though is that in the foreseeable future the possibility of earning greater income wil bring forth greater productive effort. This will increase the total wealth of the economy and, under the difference principle, the wealth of the last advantaged. Advocates of strict equality argue that inequalities permitted by the difference principle are unacceptable even if they do benefit the least advantaged. The probelm  for these advocates is to explain in a satisfactory way why the relative position of the least advantaged is more important than their absolute position, and hence why society should be prevented from materially benefiting the least advantaged when this is possible.

The difference principle is criticized as a primary distributive principle on the grounds that it mostly ignores claims that people deserve certain economic benefits in of their actions. They argue that the explanation of how people come to be in more or less advantaged positions is relevant to their fainess,yet the difference principle wrongly ignores these explanation. Other principles of distributive Justice also has its weaknesses(the index problem). The two main problems are the construction of appropriate indices for measurement, and the specification of time frames. Because there are numerous proposed solutions to these probelms, the principle of strict equality' is not a single principle but a name for a group of closely related principles. This range of possible specifications occurs with all the common principles of distributive justice. The index pobelm arises primarily because the goods to be distributiveneed to be measured if they are going to be distributed acording to some pattern( such as equality). One way of solving the index problem in the strict equality case to specify that everyone should have the same bundle of material goods and services rather than the same level. The main probelm with this solution is that there will be many other allocations of material goods and services which will make some people better off without making anybody worse off.The second main problem involves time frames. Many distributive principles indentify and require that a perticular pattern of distribution be achieved. But they also need to specify when the pattern is required. One version of the principle of strict equality requires that all people should have the same wealth at some initial point, after which people are free to use their wealth in whatever why they choose. Principles specifying initial distributions after which the patern need not be preserved are commonly called' starting gate ' principles. There are a number of direct moral criticims made of strict equality principles:that they unduly restrict freedom, they they do not give best effect to equal respect for persons, that they conflict what people deserve, but the most common criticism is that everyone can be materially better off if incomes are not strictly equal.

In conclusion, Through out my essay I discussed the key features of both concepts of justice, i have discussed that Restorative justice is a princible which involves parties such as the offender, the vistim and the comunity to help solving probelms in crime. By resolving how to deal with the artermath of the offence and its implications for the future. I have also discussed Distributive justice and its two principles which were proposed by John Rawls, who called 'justice as fairness'. I also learnt there are limitations to both concepts of justice. Both being successfull concepts of justice they are still criticised  today.