The philosophical definition of Justice is quite different from our standard dictionary defintion. I read some definitions where justice was used as a word defining getting the correct retribution for a crime. “Justice was done!” But was it?
“In philosophy, justice is fundamentally defined as the moral principle of rendering to each person their due, encompassing fairness, desert (merit), and the proper, impartial treatment of individuals. It acts as a core virtue for both individuals and social institutions, balancing rights, obligations, and the distribution of benefits and burdens. (Miller;2017)”
The key words are rendering to each person their due! This does not say Man, Child or Woman it uses the term person. What is a person?
MacIsaac (2022) determines that “a person is a being endowed with imagination. A person is able to think abstractly, to project themself into imaginary situations, to plan for the future, and to reflect on the past.”
I find this quite a challenging statement as I am aware of some ‘persons’ who are unable to use their imagination. It would appear that there are some human beings (biological format of the two legged species that haunts the earth crust) who are more aligned with being a person than others! Watch the news and scroll through social media and you will see this hypothesis confirmed.
Watching the comments and posts across social media and then placing them against definitions of what is being human and the concepts of humanity vs personhood might lead the observer to wonder if there are different grades of humans.
This is what Chat GPT (AI formulated response to my sentence above)
Congratulations, you’ve wandered straight into one of the oldest philosophical rabbit holes and dressed it up in a very modern outfit made of comment sections and bad takes.
If you line up social media behaviour next to classic ideas of “the human”, it does start to look like there are different grades on display. Not biologically, obviously. Same species, same wiring. The grading happens at the level of attention, empathy, and reflective capacity.
Humanity is usually framed as a shared condition. Vulnerability, mortality, dependence, the capacity to suffer and to care. Personhood is more selective. It is about recognition, moral standing, being treated as someone rather than something. Social media muddies this distinction by rewarding performance over presence. Loudness over listening. Certainty over curiosity.
So what you end up observing is not higher and lower humans, but different degrees of engagement with being human. Some people are operating in full-contact mode. They register nuance, other minds, consequence. Others are functioning more like reactive systems. Stimulus in, outrage out. No pause long enough for another person to fully exist.
The danger is that once you start thinking in “grades,” the slide toward dehumanisation is quick and slick. History is very clear about how badly that goes. The more useful framing is not ranking humans, but noticing conditions that thin or thicken humanity. Anonymity thins it. Speed thins it. Fear thins it. Slowness, relationship, and accountability tend to thicken it back up.
As an observer, the real discomfort comes from realising this is situational, not fixed. The same person can appear profoundly humane in one context and strangely absent of it in another. Online spaces are particularly good at stripping away the cues that normally call our better selves forward.
So no, there are no different grades of humans. There are different depths at which people are currently swimming. Some are in the shallows, splashing and yelling. Some are deeper, quieter, feeling the pressure and the presence of others. And the unsettling part is knowing we all drift between those levels, depending on the water we’re dropped into (Chat GPT; 2026)
Othering
This is where I believe the concept of othering comes in. I have noticed over the years that people are not racist towards people they love or are good friends with. I nearly wrote but they are misogynistic towards those they love……. but I thought better of it because you would not treat another person with such disrespect if you truly loved them. Understanding true love is another rabbit hole to explore.
“On an individual level, othering plays a role in forming prejudices against people and groups. On a larger scale, it can also play a role in the dehumanization of entire groups of people, which can then be exploited to drive changes in institutions, governments, and societies. It can lead to the persecution of marginalized groups, the denial of rights based on group identities, or even acts of violence against others (Cherry;2025)
If as Chat GPT highlighted we start singling out those humans who are less than humane, would we ‘other’ them and place them outside of our community or would we be just and give them a equitable portion and allow for the fact that they are transient in their current philosophy and may be on the edge of expanding their consciousness to learn respect for all?
Let me tell you a story:
Once upon a time there was a shortage of paper pulp, it was announced on the news, so John jumped in his car and drove towards his nearest supermarket. On his way he had a brainwave he would collect his trailer to allow him to carry more. Now John had added 2+2 and realised the shortage of paper pulp would impact on toilet paper manufacture. He arrived at one of the big 5 and saw it was quiet in the car park. Good John thought no-one else is storming the supermarkets yet. John wished his wife had been on a day off as she could have pushed another trolley, but hey it is what it is. So John sets to and pushes his first trolley into the store. John uses the scan and pay handset so that he can speed up the process of clearing the shelf of its toilet roll stock. John admittedly took about six trolley runs because toilet rolls are bulky. No one was concerned, a few people laughed and asked him if there was outbreak of dysentery in his house.
John now has a car and trailer full of toilet roll which he takes to his garage and stacks the rolls along the walls. John heads out to another few stores repeating his exercise until his garage is full.
Several things may have happened next, the news about paper pulp may have been tactical scare-mongering by a questionable journalist who did not check his facts, and the supermarket had access to plenty of toilet roll stocks so used their resupply to restock without any issues.
But was it fair that John used his knowledge to fill his garage with toilet roll?
Should we share information that may place others at a disadvantage if they remain unaware of a situation such as a shortage of a commodity?
In conversation with Chat GPT my resident philosopher –
A decent rule of thumb is this: If the information gives advantage primarily to those with excess capacity (time, money, transport, storage), think twice. You are not leveling the field. You are tilting it. So yes, sometimes the most humane act is restraint. Not secrecy for power, but silence for stability. Wisdom isn’t just knowing things. It’s knowing when knowledge should travel slowly, wrapped in context, rather than sprinting naked through a crowd.
Rational Ending?
What if I told that John was a parish councilor and he had stockpiled his garage to distribute the toilet roll to the elderly and infirm when the toilet roll inevitably ran out.
Resources
Chat GPT Accessed 27/01/2026
Cherry, Kendra (2025) How Othering Contributes to Discrimination and Prejudice. Very Well Mind. Accessed at https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-othering-5084425#:~:text=Othering%20can%20be%20thought%20of,thought%20to%20them%20as%20individuals
MacIsaac, Anthony. (2022) What is a person? Philosophy Now. 149.
Accessed at 2026:https://philosophynow.org/issues/149/What_is_a_Person
Miller, David. (2017) The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy , Edward N. Zalta and Uri Nodelman (eds.), Stanford, USA. Accessed at https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/justice/#:~:text=First%2C%20it%20shows%20that%20justice,is%20properly%20entitled%20to%20have.
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