Please help with this assignment!Thanks. I picked "Justice" I want to write about What is the moral aspect of Justice. Tell how can I write like the following below. Have to write like this and don't know how to go about it.Thanks!
Definition
Read the following example of the use of definition—and an opposition of definitions—by Martin Luther King in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.”
Notice how King first draws the general distinction between just and unjust laws, and then applies the definitions to demonstrate that segregation laws are unjust. Notice, too, how he invokes the religious authority of Aquinas, a medieval scholar and Catholic saint, the Jewish scholar Martin Buber, and Paul Tillich, a profoundly influential twentieth-century Lutheran theologian.
How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of Harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas:
An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust.
All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority. Segregation, to use the terminology of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, substitutes an "I-it" relationship for an "I-thou" relationship and ends up relegating persons to the status of things.
Hence segregation is not only politically, economically and sociologically unsound, it is morally wrong and sinful. Paul Tillich has said that sin is separation. Is not segregation an existential expression of man's tragic separation, his awful estrangement, his terrible sinfulness? Thus is it that I can urge men to obey the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court, for it is morally right; and I can urge them to disobey segregation ordinances, for they are morally wrong.
Questions:
1. What problem does King try to solve?
2. Why does he use definition as a principle strategy to accomplish this goal?
3. Why would he use famous theologians as his authorities for his definition of “just” laws?
1 answer