The Right and Justice Between What is Right and What is Useful

Abstract

Is justice useful to the strongest, in other words to the power? Are the right and the usefulness of the power consistent to the justice in its most elaborate principles? Further more, why should the individual be right, in other words, adapt itself to a justice imposed upon him like being useful to the power? These few questions claim to receive much more detailed answers through this article, even though not in an exhaustive manner. First by explaining the concept usefulness and right as being both sides of a good highlighting that these concepts are not opponents and that they can coexist together. The usefulness is more individualistic but it can be developed and transformed into a social usefulness, national useful, universal useful, and it can coexist in a more natural and organic way with the concept right, which in itself is more collective, more inter-subjective. To Epicurus, the right consists in the useful with the mutual relations. The right needs to express something which is useful to the society. A confrontation with John Rawls’ Theory of Justice, despite the difficulties it contains, tends to explain that the collective usefulness is right. Right is precisely this, a link between these two concepts.

DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2013.v4n6p589