Thoughts on Justice
Another human invention
Justice has a couple of senses that are related but also distinct.
On the one hand we have a question of fairness. We get this sense quite vividly when we are little kids. It's been shown that chimpanzees have a sense of fairness.
Another sense of justice is when a criminal is punished for their crime.
That is, "justice is served" when a criminal matter is brought to a legal conclusion.
Crimes do harm - it's why we call them crimes. But often serving justice does nothing to repair the harm and is a harm in itself.
One of the wellsprings of the sense of justice is perhaps the feeling of "we can't let them get away with this". We are willing to pay for punishment so that certain behaviors are strongly inhibited.
When George Floyd's murderers were convicted people were dancing in the streets singing that justice had been done. The murder convictions do nothing towards bringing Mr Floyd back to life but they were celebrating that bad cop behavior was being discouraged.
The fairness sense of justice requires that the legal sense of justice be applied equally to everyone. "The law, in it's majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor from sleeping under bridges"
These days billionaires under criminal indictment show how tattered that equality is.
People busted for a broken tail-light can end up in jail before they can go home. Billionaires can run appeals out for years.
This doesn't seem fair - but it's legal.
Justice must be seen to be done. It's why we have public courts instead of star chambers. One of the motivations for the BLM movement was to very publicly keep police atrocities in the public eye. The fog of disinformation that permeates society these days makes it very hard to see justice being done. One information silo thinks it's done and another thinks that justice is denied.
When justice is seen to be done people get a sense of closure and can let the matter fall out of their lives. Nothing can bring back the past but also we have to defend ourselves against the past infecting the future.
One time I was walking home past a pub when a bunch of drunk guys started pushing me around. I ran. Stopped at the corner to look both ways and saw a cop sitting in the intersection who had seen the whole thing. He flipped his flashing lights, drove onto the sidewalk and called for backup. Within minutes I saw those guys in handcuffs. A cop comes over to me and asks me whether I wanted to press charges. He shook his head and I went along and said no.
I thought justice had been done
What do you think?
I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life.
I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it.
Each week I write a short essay to set the topic.
I show a selection of them here.