What IS justice?

Post Reply New Topic

Justice is all subjective nonsense, until one day you wake up and you're the one getting screwed over by someone else.

You're an angry and bitter man.

I'm less bitter around people who have a more positive view of humanity. Cantankerous reactionaries get me down.

Of what effect is a dictionary when not everyone accepts the definitions in the dictionary.

ruveyn

That's not always the case, sometimes they feel bad simply because they realize nothing will bring their loved ones back and because they sometimes realize that the murderer had loved ones too who are never going to see that individual again.

It seems to me like there really is no justice for murder crimes. It feels wrong to let that person live after what they've done, yet it also feels wrong to kill that person because you realize it doesn't fix anything.

The original question was, "What IS justice?". That is a request for a definition of the concept. If you use examples, you are showing how it has been applied, and the decisions in those cases may not have been entirely just. If you look it up in a dictionary, you will get a pure definition of the concept in its most ideal form, which is what people aim to achieve. It is quite possible for the ideal to be lost in its application.

Let's use a different example. Suppose someone said, "What is a ball?" You could us a dictionary, or you could show them a picture of a ball. However, if you use pictures then the matter gets more complicated. Suppose you showed them a picture of a basketball, and then a few days later they walked into a sports shop and saw a rugby ball. They probably wouldn't recognise it as a ball because it is a funny shape in comparison with the basketball. If, however, you showed them the dictionary, then the dictionary definition would probably enable them to realise that a rugby ball is still a ball.

And again, The Devil's Dictionary wins out:

JUSTICE, n. A commodity which is a more or less adulterated condition the State sells to the citizen as a reward for his allegiance, taxes and personal service.

Tadzio

That is a definition written by a cynic. I'll stick with the Oxford as it is properly researched and much less biased. Visagrunt gave a very good definition too.

The cynical comes the closest to the current practice of "justice" in the human court.

If you want a more philosophical version of the abstractions of the "aimed" practice of justice, try books-dot-google with search "Rationalist Del Vecchio's" for the rationalist/natural-law, then "Alf Ross justice" for the analytical/positivist, then "Bentham John Bowring" for the utilitarian and other theories. In university, I tried for a generalized start with anything like my set of "The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (8 Volumes in 4 Books) by Paul Ed Edwards (1972), but it only has a "snippet view" at books-dot-google. (The "Justice" entry was by Stanley I. Benn (Vol 3-4, pp. 298-302). A books-dot-google search for "'Stanley I. Benn' Justice" gives about 535 results). Parts of Jeremy Bentham are still on display as an "Auto-icon", but he went to pieces, while Lenin is still sticking together in display.

Tadzio

Thanks for the book recommendations. Do I take it, then, that you also consider examples of justice in practice as at a greater risk of misrepresenting the concept than a dictionary's definition? Also (in my view anyway) the justice system here in New Zealand is pretty fair. In fact, many of the Judges really care and worry about the criminals they are punishing, so they aren't simply disciplinarians. That's not to say they will be lenient when they shouldn't, but they do try and encourage the more vulnerable crooks to make a better life for themselves once they are free.

I take the concept as being very vague. Older approaches which tried to establish a valid and
objective concept of justice always ended up buried in details. Enough to fill many of the
World's largest Law Libraries. The fear of reductionism was extremely great before computers
became ubiquitous, and it still remains, just not as flaunted as it use to be. Computers and
the internet certainly have illustrated that the most complex things can be reduced to long
strings of binary numbers, so the old argument about hiding everything by claiming everything
is too complex is not nearly as strong now.

Wordy "Plain English" concepts of justice are easiest, but IMO flawed, with Jeremy Bentham,
with brief summaries loaded with interesting leads: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Bentham

My formal encounters with "Justice" have been with civil matters, and the justice system is
far from meeting any ideals. I sued an agency of the federal government, and one memorable
paradox the government cited to the next to last highest court was a paradox I first read in
Rabelais' "Gargantua and Pantagruel" about judges avoiding responsibility for making decisions
as much as possible, to the extent of deciding legal issues by "rolling the dice", which
is again as a much more brief statement in The Devil's Dictionary:
APPEAL, v.t. In law, to put the dice into the box for another throw.
But, the precedent court case the government cited about this issue was about 50 pages long.

Using computer programming as a similar model, building up from assembly language to higher
and higher languages that are "easier" to use and understand (but limiting in the most difficult
ways to understand), I like the "assembly language" of Skinnerian Behaviourism in building
models of complex human behaviour and the large sets of verbal behaviours that are given
rather inconcise labels, like with the label "justice". Wild polemics against Skinner came
from every direction and most every school of philosophy, but the only valid attack involved
the tremendously large number of "details" involved for anything to be useful beyond limited
simple things, like learning to type, ride a bicycle, etc., or to teach a chicken to do
arithmetic faster than humans. Looking at the "details" was an "impossible reduction" of
the whole into necessarily damaged parts, which if this were a valid argument, it would be
impossible to learn or form a complex idea from a computer, which is how an extremely large
number of people now learn complex ideas. So, the horrible ills and flack of "reductionism"
has been replaced with the polemics of "just look the other way" and pretend that the use of
behaviourism is something else now.

"Beyond Freedom and Dignity" by Burrhus Frederic Skinner (1972) is almost too easy to read,
and a search for the word "justice" directs to a couple relevant pages. A book that started
to be another attack against Skinner ended up being "banished" by the promoters of polemics,
and a quick search for the word "justice" in the book The Skinner Primer: Behind Freedom and
Dignity" by Finley Carpenter illustrates the attack resulting in a verification of the value.

Siger de Brabant "played with the dismal doctrine of eternal" repetition of combinations,
while Nietzsche added (or "rediscovered" the permutations) which fits very nicely into
Skinnerian Behaviourism with parts re-labeled to "justice": "It is not a matter of 'subject'
or 'object', but of a certain animal species who thrives because of a justice, and above
all regularity relative to its perceptions (so that it can capitalize on its own experience).
"Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle" by Pierre Klossowski, Daniel W. Smith (1998), pages 102-103.
(I'm more on "Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same" by Karl Löwit,
and kicking the "same").

Tadzio

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4jAr51Iod8&feature=related[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3Wvz8iEW_s&feature=related[/youtube]