The Beauty of Justice

Abstract

Justice has been examined in copious ways. Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas, and John Stuart Mill owned their own ideas about justice. Aristotle and Aquinas mention an individual virtue of justice, and law. For them, it is giving others what they are due. Justice connects with what is lawful or fair, and someone who is unjust is greedy or not fair in that connotation. An unjust law is one that does not promote peace, justice, or virtue. For them that is what happiness is comprised of. Laws should be created through reason and order. They believe that there is a natural order that should be followed, and pronounce that the laws should force the citizens to promote the common good. Mill attested that people should not have to do that. The government should only restrict an individual's liberty to protect them from harm. He thought that people should be able to live an unhappy life if they choose, since he believed liberty was paramount. Furthermore, he wrote that justice correlates with people obtaining what they deserve. That is also one way Aristotle and Aquinas view justice. I apply this concept of justice to two previous SARS-CoV2 face mask requirements, and evaluate that they were superfluous, as people were required to wear face masks when they could socially distance in one edict. In the other edict face masks were mandated in all indoor places regardless of vaccination status if the owner did not require proof of vaccination. Vaccines decrease the risk of COVID-19 by fifty percent in a crowd of people, and they produce less drastic symptoms of COVID-19. They were received by many, making it just to not have to wear a mask as regularly, the survival rate of COVID-19 in 2020 was ninety-nine point nine nine percent for people under the age of fifty, the effects of the virus could worsen if someone breathes in their own air, face masks depersonalize humans, and they could harm people who have COPD. These reasons and others are ample in my opinion for these executive orders to not have been implemented. Aristotle might agree that face masks were not necessary outside when people could space out. He could argue that people should not be mandated to wear a mask in every indoor area besides. While Aquinas was more concerned with liberty he might trouble himself with regarding both of the mandates as unjust or unfair, since they seem to not promote the common good. Mill would most likely classify the Coronavirus as harm and state that both mandates were just. Face masks are effective, yet these two mandates were not necessary, and thus unjust, in my conviction.