What is it to Wrong Someone? A Puzzle about Justice

Abstract

Justice is defined by a bipolar or relational normativity, distinguishing directed duties toward specific others from monadic moral requirements. This dikaiological structure establishes a nexus of right (ius) that constitutes agents as persons within a manifold of mutual recognition. The central philosophical difficulty lies in identifying the conditions under which these relational moral thoughts gain truth and content. Establishing a shared normative order requires a common account of the agents’ practical orientations, yet traditional frameworks prove insufficient. Humean accounts ground justice in social practices but fail to accommodate universal duties toward outsiders. Aristotelian models link justice to the human life form, yet face epistemological challenges regarding non-empirical knowledge of that nature and the status of non-human rational beings. Kantianism attempts to unify all rational agents under a single manifold of personhood, but such a move necessitates a robust, potentially problematic metaphysics of pure practical reason to guarantee that disparate agents act under a singular, identical law. These competing interpretations reveal a fundamental conflict between the requirements of moral intuition and the metaphysical grounding necessary for a coherent theory of relational justice. – AI-generated abstract.