From a deontic point of view, justice involves the administering of just deserts – folks getting what they deserve. Justice is about fairness and equality. Good things ought to happen to people who do good, and bad things ought to happen to those who do wrong. Justice is a mysterious karmic demand that needs to be satisfied, like a god needing oblation.
From a consequentialist point of view, no one deserves anything in any sense other than a consequentialist sense. There are no mysterious karmic demands or gods needing to be appeased.
In the parable of the talents, a master gives his servants large amounts of money (The NIV version uses 'bags of gold'). The servants are judged based on the consequences of their uses of the money (they are judged too by their virtue, but consequence drives virtue: the virtuous person aims for good consequences). One of the servants misuses the money, and the master wishes he (the master) had given that money to the other servant who was a good steward of resources.
This is a consequentialist sense of deserving. A person deserves a good if that good maximizes flourishing in their hands and not in the hands of another.
We often feel that an injustice has occurred if someone works hard, is talented, and has a good heart, but never receives any reward. Conversely, someone who cheats their way to the top deserves none of the promotions they receive. I think we'll find that we feel this way for consequentialist reasons. It's intrinsically difficult to be motivated to work hard. The promise of reward enables the motivation. So if we observe people working hard and getting nothing out of it, then we will be demotivated from working hard, which will have poor consequences. If we observe people getting rewarded for cheating their way to the top, then that will motivate us to do the same, which will likewise, in the long run at least, lead to poor consequences.
So a consequentialist notion of justice can involve a consequentialist notion of just deserts. But there's another definition of justice I like: Justice has been achieved when there is a direct correlation between virtue and power. Justice has failed when there is a direct correlation between vice and power. This definition is compatible with the first, because when virtuous people have power, total flourishing is maximized, and when evil people have power, total flourishing is minimized.
Justice can be used to refer to a state of affairs, or to a process. Thus, justice is the process of establishing a direct correlation between virtue and power, or of breaking the connection between vice and power. We can replace 'virtue' with 'truth', 'vice' with 'falsehood', and 'power' with 'survival'; justice has been achieved when truth prevails and when falsehoods die, not because some magical debt has been settled, but because truth leads to flourishing and falsehoods lead to misery.
Anyway, the point of all that is to say that Plato saw this many years ago (though apparently the authorship of Alcibiades is disputed):
"But, Socrates, I think that the Athenians and the rest of the Hellenes do not often advise as to the more just or unjust; for they see no difficulty in them, and therefore they leave them, and consider which course of action will be most expedient; for there is a difference between justice and expediency. Many person have done great wrong and profited by their injustice; others have done rightly and come to no good."
-Alcibiades, Alcibiades I
From Plato Complete Works, Benjamin Jowett and George Burges translation
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