Where does justification collide?

In criminal law, a justification is a ground that renders conduct otherwise treated as an offense lawful, such as self-defense or necessity, so the actor is held to have done no legal wrong. William Blackstone's 1769 Commentaries on the Laws of England described justifiable acts, including justifiable homicide, as conduct the law permits or approves rather than merely forgives. George Fletcher's 1978 Rethinking Criminal Law is the modern work that sharpened the line between justification, which approves the act, and excuse, which forgives the actor. This referent is a legal verdict about an act, distinct from a soul declared righteous, a belief shown to be warranted, or text set flush to both margins.[1][2]

Unit

A single act judged lawful or unlawful under a claimed ground

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Determined at trial by whether the elements of a recognized justification are proven

In epistemology, justification is what makes a belief warranted or rational, the feature that a mere true guess lacks and that a well-grounded belief has. Edmund Gettier's 1963 paper Is Justified True Belief Knowledge? made the term central by showing that a justified true belief can still fall short of knowledge, sharpening a question about warrant that reaches back to Plato's Theaetetus. William Alston's 1989 Epistemic Justification gathered the main competing accounts of what such warrant consists in. The referent here is the standing of a belief held by a knower, not a sinner counted righteous, a lawful ground in court, or the alignment of type on a page.[3][4]

Unit

The warrant attaching to one belief held by one knower

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Assessed philosophically against accounts of evidence, reliability, or coherence