April 27, 2005

Objective Justice

this is in response to Psuche's recent blog.

Ok, I’m going to attempt to keep this response as mentally legible as possible. But as it’s a long post with many ideas & I’m not the best at written responses it’s anyone’s guess how well I do.

Now you start with the statement that anything that supports life will be upheld by justice, anything detrimental to life will be punished. Now first off this is a species specific, so justice only applies to humans, how else would we eat. And that’s another argument all together. Now justice is blind but people are not, so lets take some time for a thought project.

Here is the situation 2 people, we’ll call them Art & Bert, are put into a biosphere for an unspecified amount of time. both are intelligent people, but bad at statistics & game theory ;), of equal physical ability. Now after some time Art & Bert both notice that they are getting diminishing returns on the crops they are growing. Art, who always was a bit paranoid, starts to save portions of his food allotment that store, just in case they are not let out before there is no more food. Bert on the other hand is confident that they’ll be let out soon and eats the normal amount. Time goes by and there is no more new food. Only Art has food. However because of his reduced rations he is now weaker than Bert.
There are 4 possible outcomes: a)both are alive, b)Art is alive, c)Bert is alive, d)both are dead.
We will ignore a & d since there is no real justice to be objective.
Now b will only occur if Art does not act in favor of Bert’s life, so would how would an objective justice react to Art’s killing of Bart through inaction? Is it just for Art to place his own life above Bert’s?
Now if c occurs, Bert would have killed Art, though the quick killing is more humane than the starvation would have been, he has actively done harm to another in order to preserve his own life. Now would an objective justice uphold Bert in this scenario?

If you can have an objective justice then there must be a clear cut answer to the above quandary as to who recieved justice or who deserves.


Next section refers to your using of justice to explain an accident, like the trucker, but this is a false statement for justice is:

1.The quality of being just; fairness.
2.The principle of moral rightness; equity.
3.Conformity to moral rightness in action or attitude; righteousness.
4.The upholding of what is just, especially fair treatment and due reward in accordance with honor, standards, or law.
Law. The administration and procedure of law.
5.Conformity to truth, fact, or sound reason:


Now you might say that definition 4 is the one which proves it is just. But that defination is so incredibly vague wide reaching that it essentially says justice=reality=justice=reality, ad nausium. I mean conformity to truth, or fact? Reality is truth, so conformity to truth means you don’t break the laws of reality. No true fact can ever go against reality, so every true fact is truth. And sound reason? This is subjective, unless you want to consider sound reason to mean reason base on truth & fact, but since no human can ever truly know if they know the truth, or the facts sound reason in this sense is beyond our comprehension. But I digress.
Definition # 4 essentially says that everything is justice & justice is everything, so if you are going to fall back and say that definition 4 proves the truck driver received justice, then I turn around and say I can kill someone for no reason and they received justice, for I what I did conformed with truth or fact. But that goes against your precept that justice ‘cares’ about life. Now you could say that people will arrest & hang me, and that could be reality delivering justice, BUT I could just as easily get away with it.

So I feel that this logically proves that justice cannot be objectively defined, or i've written a load of crap.
objectively speaking, which would it be?

-De

PS i'm using this defination of objective :Uninfluenced by emotions or personal prejudices:

1 comment:

DeHuman8 said...

or made our commander in chief