What is Justice?

Summary

In this dialogue, a case is made that justice is a kind of social proxy for the cause-effect relation. When in a state of nature, man has no one but himself to rely on in his dealings with nature, which, though cruel, is consistent, driven as she is by inviolable physical laws and which, consequently, always rewards an action with an equal and opposite reaction. But human beings are emotional and therefore mercurial creatures, and when avails himself of their assistance, they may decide not to honor their commitments to him. The interrelations of the members of a given society are just to the extent that its members fulfill their mutual obligations as consistently as nature follows her own laws, and those interrelations are unjust to the extent that they don't.