Accelerated Adolescence

Justice

Over the last two or three years I have been causing quite an annoyance (I know, I know, only two or three years?) at social gatherings. When the conversation approaches the level of being meaningful, perhaps a light debate is in full swing, I pop that annoying question that everyone hates. Actually, there are a number of them, but they are all fundamentally philosophical and noxious because few people, if any, have good answers to such vague questions. The question that has helped me to achieve great notoriety, of late, is, "What is justice?"

Well, I've been pondering this lately and I think that I might have a moderately reasonable answer to my own purposefully vague question. If you will bear with me, I will present it now. By no means is this final or even better than a rough idea and I hope that my readers, far brighter than, will elucidate the areas where I am foggy.

Justice -

Justice is an ideal social state of being brought about by social action and it is, of necessity, temporally episodic as far as in one moment there may be justice and the next there may be injustice. Justice is the due and appropriate apportioning to each individual the amount of anything that the individual is uniquely capable of using or interacting with effectively. I suppose that people are thinking of receiving wealth but struggles, illness, suffering, as well as happiness go along with this. In the event that each individual cannot receive to their full capacity, then each individual (see aportioning) will receive the fitting percentage of their capacity such that everyone profits or suffers to their own capacity.

In a litigous sense, justice provides the victim with restitution while limiting the power of the perpetrator only so much that they are unable to recitivate. It is important to understand justice, in an abstractly pure form, does not create another victim (as our current judicial system does so regularly).

Posted by Mendon at June 29, 2006 11:50 PM