Justice: 1. being righteous…2. fairness…3. rightfulness
4.reward or penalty as deserved…
5.the use of authority to uphold what is just…6.the administration of law…
7. do justice to…to treat fairly…
This dry definition doesn’t really cover the word “justice” does it?
People have trying to work out what justice is since Plato…
The Republic is basically working out the concept of justice…
and that was 2500 years ago and we still don’t have a good working
notion of Justice…and I certainly won’t solve this problem in
this thread but I want to look at what seems to be justice and what
isn’t justice… we may not be able to define it, but at least we
can identify it…
I was watching Broadchurch last week and a father who son was
murdered told his ex-wife that he was looking for “justice for Danny”
(danny being his son) and we are familiar with this idea that
crime and injustice needs to be punished…it needs justice…
now justice seems to be for those who have suffered from crime
or injustice… so can we ask for justice for those who
haven’t suffered a crime or injustice? it doesn’t seem so…
so for us to find justice, we need a victim or someone who
has injustice done to them…
now we are trained to think of injustice in terms of the legal or the law…
a crime was committed and we are looking for justice…
now is that crime being committed, about a crime committed
against a single individual or can the crime be committed against
the society?
Now punishments for crimes tend to be define as punishments
for acts committed against a sole person but is socially punished,
the community itself punishes people and the community employs
the police and the judicial system to find and dispense justice in that
community name…so an individual act of one person violence against
another will bring a response to finding justice from the community…
it is considered a crime against the community when one person commits
a crime against another person who belongs in the community…
the act of justice is taken away from a single person…
justice is a community activity and not allowed to be conducted by
an individual…
now we further try to understand justice… let us give a common
example… at my work, some people are being hired at a higher rate
then people who have been there for some time…so is it “just” for
people who have been there for a long time, to be paid less then
people who have been there for about 2 minutes? now we don’t consider
that to be a justice question because it is an economic question conducted
within a business corporation… but if a crime, injustice has been conducted
against an individual in a business, how is that different than an injustice
conducted against an individual who is just walking down the street and has
been attacked? Injustice is injustice is injustice regardless of the nature
of the injustice… but that leaves us with a question?
how do we know, KNOW, when injustice has been committed?
what is our standard for discovering when injustice has been committed?
what criteria do we use to understand when injustice has been committed?
but that means we have to understand what is right and wrong, to be
able to define what is justice and what is injustice…
this is wrong and injustice or this is right and this is justice…
it kinda like the longstanding idea about pornography…
I may not be able to define it, but I know it when I see it…
but that can either miss justice or miss injustice…
so to return to my idea of justice in the workplace which we consider
far less important then justice in the world outside of the workplace…
why are business held to a different standard of justice then a private citizen?
one argument might be the individual can walk away from injustice committed
by a business whereas an individual in the world cannot walk away from
injustice committed by an individual…
so is justice or injustice controlled by this idea that if you have
no say in or any recourse in the action of injustice, it becomes
a matter for the state? is justice for those who do not have any control
over the situation? I know of people who have been victims of injustice
in the workplace and they sued and by suing, they were fired from their
job and then other businesses wouldn’t hire these individuals
because of the lawsuit and so they were punished for suing the corporation…
justice wasn’t served by their attempts to get justice for themselves…
how do we justify this? I have seen this time and time again…
attempts to gain justice in the workplace have in the long run
created far greater injustice for the individual in question…
women who have reported being raped are often the ones
being put on trial by lawyers by character assassinating
that woman in a trial… is that justice?
and that is another little brick in the wall…
justice for one often comes at a price for some or many…
just how far are we to pursue justice?
what is the price for pursuing justice to its logical
conclusion? justice is tied to many other aspects
we consider important… if justice is to be followed,
what other damage are we to accept as a goal for justice…
for example, in the private workplace and the worker
receives a large monetary settlement for injustice committed
against that individual, but that large monetary settlement
damages the business bottom line, it damages the profit
margin of a business which affects a lot of people…
how are we to balance the needs of the one against
the needs of the many in regards to bringing about justice?
Justice does seem to be a zero sum game…
we see injustice done against individuals all the time
and we even see injustice done against a community
by a corporation… Walmart is committing injustice
against its workers by so underpaying them, that the
workers to survive must turn to welfare and other social
net programs… I see that as injustice and others see
that has the cost of a business trying to maximize profits…
so who is right? the bottom line comes down to
what you think is the basic of human standards…
in other words, if you believe that business should pay
its worker enough to support themselves even at
the cost of the bottom line, then you have certain
expectations of being human…
and that plays a role in our understanding of justice…
what ism’s and ideologies and paradigms we have
of society and of people that we bring into our understanding
of what justice is?
I believe that by virtue of being human, we have
“certain inalienable rights among them, life, liberty and
the pursuit of happiness” …
as part of being human, we have the right to feed ourselves, to clothe
ourselves, to have an education… these are certain inalienable rights we
have as being human… and among those inalienable rights, I believe
that we must have justice along with food, shelter and clothing as
a basic human right…
in a very real way, human society is predicated upon justice being
done within that society, for without justice, the community doesn’t have
the stability needed for the society for the society to grow and prosper…
the very act of there being justice allows that community to be stable.
that very actions of justice allows the community to function better…
for justice is a requirement for a society to remain viable and functional…
so if we permit injustice to stand without punishment, we damage a society’s
ability to remain stable and functional…
so when we don’t have justice for example, when the police can kill
innocent people without justice, it damages the society because
it allows injustice to go unpunished and that hurts the faith that
people have in the system…
for a society to work, it must, must have a certain number
of people who buy into the system, who believe enough in the system
to work within the system and make it work, but if you damage
people’s faith in a system, they no longer will trust in or work
with a system that allows injustice…
that trust, that faith is key to keeping a system working
and if we don’t trust a system to keep justice, then we
opt out of a system and that damages the system…
for a system to work, any system, it must have a certain
number of its parts working at any given time…
if enough parts of any system fails to work, the system
can be damaged enough to stop working…
in other words, if we allow injustice to continue,
people will opt out of the system and if enough
people opt out, the system will fail…
and that is the situation we are facing right now…
less then half the people eligible to vote, actually
voted… this is what I mean by opting out of the system…
people will no longer engage in a system that
allows injustice and if enough people fail to engage,
the system will fail…
this is in part, why liberals search for justice more
then security… we understand that without justice
the society will at some point fail and we are fast approaching
that moment when if enough people opt out of our system, it will
fail…
but that isn’t justice, that is what happens if we don’t
follow justice… but we still haven’t found out what is justice…
or what is injustice for that matter…
more later as we give more thought to this question of justice
or injustice…
Kropotkin