Transformation of understanding of justice in the context of the problem of social equality: a philosophical analysis

The article is devoted to the analysis of the category of “justice” through the prism of the problem of social equality. It is noted that in the pre-modern naturalistic paradigm of philosophizing, where the main narratives were the correspondence of the social order to the eternal natural law, justice was associated with inequality and the principle of hierar-chy. Moreover, just hierarchy concerned both the internal spiritual qualities of the person himself, where reason should rule over passions, and the gender-social organization of society, where a man is superior to a woman, a Greek is superior to a barbarian, and so on. Within the framework of this naturalistic paradigm Plato`s and Aristotle’s approving attitude towards slavery should be understood, because from their point of view the soul itself can be slavish and cowardly by nature or, conversely, brave and freedom-loving. In the medieval paradigm of philosophizing, the conceptual connection of jus-tice-inequality is preserved; however, philosophers appeal more to divine law and divine justice. It is noted that in this epoch did emerge the concept of a “just war” as a sacred moral duty to protect the innocent. This concept of a just war remains relevant to this day, in Ukrainian military realities. In the era of the Enlightenment, with the advent of the new European paradigm of philosophizing, where the emphasis is on the rational subject and his will to power, justice began to be understood precisely as equality, as evi-denced by the philosophical tradition begun by I. Kant and continued in the twentieth century in the theories of justice of J. Rawls and J. Habermas.