Abstract

The present research paper is a modest attempt to explore the philosophical foundations of contemporary social justice from the underlying spirit of rectificatory justice of Aristotle as elaborated in the book five of Nicomachean Ethics. From Aristotlean Ethics, the foundations of social justice could be explored on four fold dimension of spirit, base, assumptions and mechanism. The spirit of rectificatory justice is rectification or correction. The base is arithmetical distribution of the resources on the basis of positive discrimination. The assumption is that injustice has occurred and mechanism is to reduce the undue gains and undue losses. For clear understanding of the theme, we divide it in three parts. The first part of the paper will examine Aristotle’s definition and types of justice and describe briefly the notion of rectificatory justice. The second part will discuss the complex notion of social justice which incorporating brief description of the unjust discrimination based on false assumptions of caste, creed, and sex etc., for debarring and depriving the suppressed group from the due facility and opportunities.. And in the third concluding part, we shall try to see how four fundamentals of Aristotle’s rectificatory justice: spirit, base, assumption and mechanism have contributed to social justice. We shall also try to understand peculiarity of social justice and Aristotelian foundation of recificatory justice in terms of its relevance as the remedial directions.