Shylock Vs Antonio Case Analysis

In the case of Shylock v. Antonio, Shylock was a moneylender who lent three thousand ducats to a merchant named Antonio. According to the stipulations of the contract, if Antonio fails to repay the loan within three months, Shylock would be entitled to cut out a pound of flesh from his body. As a consequence of it, Antonio would be killed as no man can survive after cutting out such a big amount of flesh from his body. Now, Ernest J. Weinrib has given us two methods of delivering justice- Corrective Justice and Distributive Justice.
According to him, injustice occurs when one party suffers a wrongful loss, and that loss is equal to the wrongful gain by the other party. He views two parties under normative conditions. He perceives them to be

Antonio, morals and ethics cannot be blatantly ignored. Even if according to the stipulations of the contract, Shylock should be getting his pound of flesh, he cannot be given as that will take Antonio’s life. Antonio had urgently need the money and thus agreed to the contract, but just because his ships had got late he cannot be made to pay with his life. Even while delivering corrective justice and restoring the initial standard or equality, one cannot be deprived of his life. We have to give the judgement in favour of Antonio from a moral point of view. Without morals and ethics the judgement would be unjust. I will be illustrating this point with an example. If I go to a bakery daily and there I see a poor, homeless and hungry boy staring at freshly baked cookies and cakes. He has not eaten for says and has no money to buy even a single cookie. Still, he does nothing but stares at them every day and satiates his hunger just by looking at them. One day, he hungry that he cannot control his desire any longer and steals one cookie from the bakery and eats it. The baker catches him and drags him to court. Now, the court cannot deliver a judgement solely on the principles of corrective justice as that would be completely unfair. The court also has to take into account other factors such as the situation in which the poor boy was on the basis of humanitarian grounds. Similarly, in the present case of Shylock and Antonio the court of duke cannot solely consider the terms and conditions of the contract as Antonio had no intension to cause monetary harm to