Social Justice is a concept that has fascinated philosophers ever since Plato rebuked the young Sophist, Thrasymachus, for asserting that justice was whatever the strongest decided it would be. In The Republic, Plato formalized the argument that an ideal state would rest on four virtues: wisdom, courage, moderation, and justice.
Social Justice is distinct from justice as applied in the law — state-administered systems which label behavior as unacceptable, enforce a formal mechanism of control, and may produce results that do not match the philosophical definitions of social justice — and from more informal concepts of justice embedded in systems of public policy and morality, which differ among cultures and therefore lack universality. Social justice is also used to refer to the overall fairness of a society in its divisions and distributions of rewards and burdens and, as such, the phrase has been adopted by political parties with a redistributive agenda.
