Justice is another important ethical standard. Justice involves protecting individual rights, or preventing an injustice to an individual. Justice also requires us to compare cases to avoid discriminating or treating people differently who are alike in relevant respects. Succinctly, it means treating people fairly.

Issues involving questions of justice and fairness are usually divided into three categories, that of distributive justice, retributive justice and compensatory justice.
Distributive justice, a theory based on writings of John Rawls, perhaps the most basic category, is concerned with the fair distribution of society’s benefits and burdens.
Rawls felt that everything must be done in an act of achieving fairness throughout. He also did not want anything to be done that may hurt or damage another person. For example, Rawls felt that throughout a society, every demographic should be allowed the same treatment and goods as any other. The poor should receive the same health care as the rich, etc. (Lamont, 2002).

Questions of distributive justice arise when different people put forth conflicting claims on society’s benefits and burdens and all the claims cannot be satisfied. The essential cases are those where there is a insufficiency of benefits such as jobs, food, housing, medical care, wealth and income as compared with the numbers and desires of the people who want these goods. The other side of the coin is that there may be too many burdens, that of unpleasant work, labor, health injuries of various sorts and not enough people willing to shoulder them. If there are enough goods to satisfy everyone’s desires and enough people willing to share society’s burdens, then conflicts between people would not arise and distributive justice would not be needed. When people’s desires and distaste exceed the sufficiency of their resources, they are forced to