What Is Justice?

Two socially disturbing incidents that happened in the province where I live speak to me about the question of justice. In 2016 a homeowner shot and killed a would-be thief who was trying to steal his truck from the driveway.[1] On August 18 a homeowner got into a violent altercation with an intruder who sustained life-threatening injuries. In the first incident, the homeowner was convicted of manslaughter and in the second incident, the homeowner was charged with aggravated assault. The popular reaction to the reported charges laid against the homeowners, as might be anticipated, has been outrage. With noted exceptions, most people side with the homeowners and their rights to protect their properties and families.

These incidents raise universal questions about justice and fairness; they also address our emotions about our own properties and our rights to self-defense. The popular reaction has been that no charges at all should be laid upon the homeowners, and one of my own friends surprisingly called the intruder, in the second incident, “scum” despite the intruder being a complete stranger. When the second incident was reported in the news, and the charge of assault was laid, even Premier Doug Ford of Ontario publicly stated his support for the homeowner and concluded his comments with “maybe these criminals will think twice about breaking into someone’s home” (CTV News, August 20, 2025).

In neither case do the public, including this writer, know much about the circumstances or the reasons why the charges laid were considered justified. In neither case did the popular mind consider the question of balanced responses and the weight of actions and reactions when considering justice. These two questions, balance and weight, have defined justice since time immemorial. Even in the cruelties of the Middle Ages, balance and weight, so often prejudicially measured, nevertheless, were used as factors of judgement. In antiquity Plato, Aristotle, and, later in the Christian tradition, Augustine all considered justice as balance and advocated for boundaries of justice (which I am referring to as “weight”) being necessary for community life. It makes sense because stealing a truck, in the first case above, is not a capital crime, and the motivation to break into a home, in the second case above, could have been hunger or safety or any number of other factors we currently do not know. We have a legal system that works to review the factors and to determine whether the violent responses were justified acts in balance with the perceived threats.

As the public, we rely on democratic institutions to work since these same institutions train our children and grandchildren to be lawyers, judges, police officers, and counsellors. The police, in the case of the break-in, have stated that they have not released to the public the circumstances they considered when laying the charge of assault. The outcry that immediately defends the homeowner’s right to beat an intruder into a coma is a quick reaction from instinct rather than from justice. It might be the case that the courts will rule the homeowner was bodily threatened and reacted with justified self-defense. Or it may be that the investigating officers know facts that the public do not know and that the charge of assault is the socially responsible charge. The public are not lawyers, the public are not investigators, the public have little or no education about justice, and the public, generally, have no knowledge about what actually happened in the cases of the theft and the break-in. The reason a legal system exists is to determine the appropriate course of justice according to the measurements of balance and weight.

Justice is not to be equated with extreme and disproportionate weight placed on violence. Justice is often confused with but has no relationship to revenge. Justice is the measurement of reason in relation to circumstance. Its resolutions need to address root causes, not surface actions. Justice must concern peacemaking, not retaliation. Justice must consider the unity of humankind, not the division of groups. These insights are not personal opinions but the backbone of teachings in the world’s diverse religions. A few quotations illustrate my point:

Live happily, not hating even those who are hostile. -Gautama the Buddha

Maybe you are searching among branches for what only appears at the roots. -Rumi

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God. -Jesus

That hand is not the color of yours, but if I prick it blood will flow and you shall feel pain. -Standing Bear

Extremism is wrong not because it is extreme but because it is socially irresponsible. It leads us to confusion about what justice means, what faith is really about, and, perhaps above all, what value reason holds. Extremist reactions, because they are extreme, do not hold balances and take away the measurements of fairness. These two social harms happen because reason is either blocked or hidden from the extremist view and because extremism devalues and sometimes ridicules the required education and training for specific judgements.

When we live in a society that no longer has care for the elements of justice, which are protected in institutions and founded on education, we will then live in an extremist society where any statement is as true as any other and where enemies proliferate by our own will.

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[1] This case was recently in the news again because of an appeal. 

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