The Justice Instinct

Although I have seen many attempts at a rigorous definition of 'justice', I have seen no clear triumphs including the Ancient Greeks. The results tend to be circular in their reasoning, culture bound sophistries. For a concept central to civilization itself, this is an unusual situation. From a naive perspective, what is justice.
Sugar cane was, from time immemorial into the Nineteenth Century, a slave industry. Sugar, it is generally agreed, is not healthy ingested in large quantities without a proper regimen. Yet the use of slave labor depressed the price of sugar to the point that this was fairly common. Therefore the deployment of an immoral economic system had an effect detrimental to the health of the people who allowed it to happen. That is justice. It is very close to irony and I know it when I see it.
From this observation it is obvious that any attempt a definition of justice would begin with the idea that for justice to exist it would have to be inherent in the nature of the universe. What, in simplistic terms, is the nature of the universe? Scalar fields decaying into particles. What is there of justice in that? Just from this superficial inquiry, the difficulty of defining justice is apparent. As in Wittgenstein's examination of 'game', a definition may not be possible.
If this is true, and so far it appears to be true, then justice, like game, like language, is an innate concept, a concept with which we are born. It could be a Kantian 'thing in itself' which interacting with perceived reality, generates specific bodies of law and cultural norms, categories of understanding.
So we are left with the justice instinct, bred into us and present at birth, which is unknowable and apparent only in the manifestations of its influence on law and culture. This may be the actual phenomenon and it cannot be conserved, only recognized. We know it when we see it.