What justice means to me

Justice is often confused with uniformity. Treating everyone exactly alike sounds reasonable until you see what it means in practice: the same rules for people who start at very different distances from the finish line.

I often think about two young people with identical grades. One has a surname that gets the letter opened. The other sends forty applications and receives two replies. Neither was given different rules. Yet they were not given the same opportunity.

Real opportunity asks more than a formal right. It assumes someone will actually test what you know, that there is a door to knock on, that a no can be understood. Without that, a right becomes a formality.

At the same time, justice does not mean outcomes must always be equal. People make different choices, hold different priorities, aim at different things. What I object to is not difference — it's difference decided before a person has been allowed to try.

So justice, for me, is fairly concrete: nobody should have to be twice as good to count as equally good. If a society manages that, we won't need to talk about justice so much. It will simply show up in ordinary life.