What is meant by “ justice”?
We often hear people say “ we need justice”.
Of course one hopes that those who have committed a crime will be arrested and brought to justice, but I hear people who think a sentence is too light or inappropriate and therefore they call for “justice.”
On today’s news in UK the families of the Nottingham students murdered a year ago were commemorating their deaths, but tomorrow they will return to their “quest for justice.”
I also hear people wanting somebody to “ pay” for an injustice, eg for the Horizon post masters scandal.
Another in today’s news was campaigning for a change in the law for new drivers, limiting their driving, no passengers etc, which she felt, if achieved would be a way of getting justice for the deaths of four young lads last year. I support the campaign but do not see it as “ justice”.
And I certainly want the right people to be penalised for their roles in the Horizon scandal.
I don’t see confinement in a secure psychiatric hospital as an unjust sentence needing a call for “justice”.
What is justice?
Does it often seem to be a cry for Vengeance?
An eye for an eye?
Of course one hopes that those who have committed a crime will be arrested and brought to justice, but I hear people who think a sentence is too light or inappropriate and therefore they call for “justice.”
On today’s news in UK the families of the Nottingham students murdered a year ago were commemorating their deaths, but tomorrow they will return to their “quest for justice.”
I also hear people wanting somebody to “ pay” for an injustice, eg for the Horizon post masters scandal.
Another in today’s news was campaigning for a change in the law for new drivers, limiting their driving, no passengers etc, which she felt, if achieved would be a way of getting justice for the deaths of four young lads last year. I support the campaign but do not see it as “ justice”.
And I certainly want the right people to be penalised for their roles in the Horizon scandal.
I don’t see confinement in a secure psychiatric hospital as an unjust sentence needing a call for “justice”.
What is justice?
Does it often seem to be a cry for Vengeance?
An eye for an eye?
Comments
"Everybody
Loves to see
Justice done
On somebody else"
I'd agree with that.
And, yes, if someone has been brought to court and then acquitted, justice has (hopefully) been done even if the "wronged" person doesn't think so.
For instance, I think that sentences for death by drunk driving are too lenient - that driver made the deliberate choice to drive when not in a fit condition to do so. Conversely some sentences, perhaps for theft, may be too harsh.
Justice for them but not for me. That somehow there's an underclass of a type of person who deserves only harsh punishment.
That's one way of looking at it, particularly in the modern era where there is something called a "justice system" devoted to using state power to punish wrongdoers. However I'd argue that the other side of justice is restoration of and reparations to the victims of injustice. Finding a way to "make whole" those who have suffered from injustice. That's often a lot harder than handing down punishments, but it seems to be "justice" just as much as punishing the unjust.
In many cases, "make whole" is easy to identify, but hard to do. Suppose you throw a rock through my window, because you're angry about something, and my window is conveniently present and breakable. It's easy to identify what "make whole" is: you pay to replace my window, plus any consequential damage (perhaps your rock or the broken glass damaged some other things inside my building; perhaps the rain came in through the window you broke and caused damage), and my reasonable costs (I'm going to have to take time away from my normal working activities in order to wait around for a glazier).
Except that you have no money and live off benefits. You don't have the ability to make me whole. How should you fix this?
Infinitely more so. Punishing the unjust facilitates social injustice by distraction. Gives it a free pass.
It could be argued that a person who drives when drunk but does not have an accident is lucky not to have killed someone. There is also a difference between a drunk driver who tries to drive normally and one who deliberately drives dangerously. Each case must be judged on it's merits.
In the criminal justice system we have innocent people who get convicted and guilty people who are aquitted. I have always believed that legal proceedings should be a search for the truth rather than a competition between legal teams.
One phrase that has always annoyed me is when a guilty person says, "I have paid my debt to society". How have they paid? What did it cost them? How did Society get compensated ?
These are the kinds of assumptions that policy makers with no background in the sciences bring to the table in committees and to the floor for votes, when making policy and rules regarding "criminal justice."
Oldest Kid used Sonja Sanchez's poem "Poem for Some Women" as an intro to her final paper, in which she argued that one cannot adequately talk about philosophy of pathopsychology, or apply it!, without first having some idea of an altered person.
Justice, even the most hopeful, is not simple.
Of course, that just pushes all the questions onto 'deserve'.
That can still be the case. It should not be the case where the best lawyer is favourite to win the day
How else can it be? Unless you have no jury. And the jury I was on had no time for either side's lawyer. They were both complete crap. Like the OJ prosecutor.
Have a different sort of jury then . Professional juries consisting of people of good reputation who have retired early
No way. There were nowt wrong wi' us. We were a superb cross section of society. The lawyers were utter, utter crap. The judge was awesome and so was the key witness. We didn't need intermediary storytellers. The plaintiff were a bad 'un.
The better advocate perhaps, but not necessarily the better lawyer overall.
I've heard it said that the French legal system is not so 'adversarial '. I wonder if this is what @Telford was getting at.
Their adversarial lawyers have to battle it out before fiercely impartial juges qua Roban in the flawless ('More twisted than 'The Wire'') Engrenage. I'd get rid of juries on economic grounds, but not on cultural ones. I've seen magistrates in action in Leicester a couple of times. Superb. Most humane.
I've seen a magistrate in action in Lancaster. Would have been laughable if it wasn't so enraging.
And the average is?... The cops there were despairingly indulgent of students.
"Indulgent of" is a funny way of saying "violent towards".
Well they weren't to us in '72. I'm sorry if you encountered otherwise.
I used to find the verse "vengenance is mine, saith the Lord, I will repay" very difficult, but now I find it quite helpful. We cannot expect a court to give either a wrongdoer or a victim "exactly what they deserve" - we don't know that and can't deliver it anyway. This is beyond our pay grade; only God can do that. The best we can do is apply the law, partly pragmatically and partly as a symbol that we care about justice. But it is only a symbol, not the reality. At best it has a "flavour" of the reality.
I believe the ancient Greek ruler Draco spotted this (though not in a good way) when he complained that unfortunately the worst penalty he could apply was death, and this didn't seem to be harsh enough to punish certain crimes.
I also believe Gandalf has it right (in a good way) when he tells Frodo that he shouldn't be keen to dish out death to Gollum just because he thinks Gollum deserves it. "Deserves it! I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them?"
We cannot provide full restitution to those that deserve it. We cannot ensure that any punishment is exactly what a wrongdoer deserves. Law is important, and it's connected with justice, but it's not and can never be the same as justice.
You destroy the only wedding photo someone has of a deceased spouse. What can make that right again? Any financial figure, any prison time, any other penalty - the price we put on the wrong is arbitrary.
What's done is done. It cannot completely - or in some cases even in part - be undone.
No I don't know where you go from there.
I used to find the verse "vengeance is mine, saith the Lord, I will repay" very difficult, but now I find it quite helpful.
This is tangent, but possibly relevant.
In 1902, a man (A) in my village was killed in a "single punch" incident. He was extremely drunk and unsteady on his feet, the single punch felled him and he hit his head hard when he fell. The man who punched him (C) was sober, and notably respectable. A's wife was pregnant with their fourth child when he was killed.
C was tried for murder. At the trial it was revealed that A had already fallen over drunk once prior to the punch and sustained a minor injury then. It was possible this first injury had been more serious than suspected. After A was punched and fell, two drunk friends dragged him off the road by his ankles and propped him against a wall; this may have exacerbated the injury. There was a delay in getting medical help because the village doctor was treating a group of drunk children and it took some time to locate him. Also, although there were a lot of witnesses, they had all been drunk and there was some confusion as to what had happened, although at no point did C deny punching him. Nor was there any doubt that if C had not punched him, A would not have died. But C was found Not Guilty.
C's employer and his minister had both provided exemplary character references.
A was buried in the churchyard. His widow organised a gravestone, with the text vengenance is mine, saith the Lord, I will repay The church told her this text was not permissible and she had to replace the gravestone. Instead she had her husband disinterred and he, and the gravestone, were moved to a municipal cemetery.
In the circumstances, should the widow have been allowed the text of her choice on her late husband's gravestone?
What was "justice" here?
Anyway, there was a good one about a gravestone which was erected as vengeance for a murder. For hundreds of years the family concerned kept on removing the gravestone in the middle of the night.
I'm not sure why this is relevant but the discussion here made me think about it.
I’m interested at the degree to which discussions of “justice” have focused on the legal system and criminal justice. (And I say that as one who practiced law, including criminal law, for 35 years.) That’s certainly an important part of justice, of course, but it’s only part. I think, for example, that when Amos says “But let justice roll down like water and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream,” he’s talking about more than a criminal justice system. He’s talking about something that’s part of the fabric of society, part of how we treat one another.
I’ll admit that I find myself wondering if we’re often keen to focus on the criminal justice system when we talk about “justice” because most of us likely don’t imagine ourselves being in a position of being a defendant in that system; it’s probably more likely that we imagine ourselves as the one wronged and are seeking justice.
I think things can get a little hairier when we take a bigger view of justice, asking questions like what are the justice implications of buying inexpensive clothes and goods that are inexpensive because those who made them aren’t paid adequately or work in bad conditions? What are the justice implications of systems that perpetuate poverty or food insecurity? What are the justice implications of the effects of centuries of government-sanctioned and society-sanctioned slavery and racism on the descendants of the enslaved?
Those are some hard questions to wrestle with, partially because many of us may find ourselves in the position of those from whom justice is due rather than to whom justice is do.
I've been thinking about this passage from Dorothy L. Sayers in The Triumph of Easter. Questions of justice are much harder when we ask them of ourselves.
The more I wail about someone else not getting what I think they deserve, the less I examine my own unjust practices and my own complicity in unjust systems.
There's no justice when someone with Einstein-level intelligence never gets a chance.
There's no justice when millions/billions live without the health basics most of us take for granted
There's no justice in an accident of birth
The whole idea of justice is, I think, essentially fractal*. By necessity, because we don't have the brainspace to contemplate the sheer level of injustice experienced by so many people. So we retreat into the idea of picking particular groups of people we feel empathy for, then if that gets overwhelming picking our own family and friends.
* Probably the wrong word, but I can't think of a better one at the moment
I'm not sure what can be done about it. Probably nothing.