There is yet another way in which traditional justice differs from social justice. Social justice is much more expansive, encompassing social abstractions that go far beyond people who ever encountered one another. 8 Presumably, no one from the seventeenth century was still alive at the end of the First World War. When you consider how hard it is to get people to treat each other justly when they are face to face, seeking to produce justice between social abstractions stretching back over the centuries is a truly ambitious undertaking. Inter-galactic travel is a modest goal by comparison.
Equality almost defies definition.
Numbers may be equal because they have just one dimension, magnitude. But people have so many dimensions that equality, superiority, or inferiority are all virtually impossible to define, except within some narrow slice of life. In sports, it is common to have voluminous statistics available on every aspect of an athlete's performance. You can win a bet, for example, by saying that Babe Ruth stole home more times than Lou Brock because such detailed statistics are kept for generations. Nolan Ryan struck out more batters but Walter Johnson pitched more shutouts.