What Is Justice?

Apr 9, 2017 //
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Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow describes one of the capabilities of our automatic brain functioning as being able to match intensities between two completely irrelevant things. Lucky for me, the example that he uses is crime and punishment:

If crimes were colors, murder would be a deeper shade of red than theft. If crimes were expressed as music, mass murder would be played fortissimo while accumulating unpaid parking tickets would be a faint pianissimo. And of course you have similar feelings about the intensity of punishments. In classic experiments, people adjusted the loudness of a sound to the severity of crimes; other people adjusted loudness to the severity of legal punishments. If you heard two notes, one for the crime and one for the punishment, you would feel a sense of injustice if one tone was much louder than the other.

For those of you who have read Deuteronomy, this sounds an awful lot like an eye for an eye. We want the intensity of a crime to match the intensity of its punishment, but unfortunately, this thinking is automatic and wholly irrational. This is easy to see when you consider that a tonal range should in no way be responsible for the judicial bedrock of a civilization.

Further problems arise with this method of justice in other areas which Kahneman investigates. Automatic thinking is prone to extreme bias, and one of these biases is anchoring. Anchoring is an estimation being influenced by an offered baseline. For example, when estimating the price of a painting, and being shown on an irrelevant slip of paper the number 10, the estimation will be closer to the number 10 than if that irrelevant number was 100 (where the estimation would be higher). It’s why haggling salespeople will always start their initial offer extremely high as this baseline will strongly influence the buyer’s counteroffer. Relating this back to justice, if we assign the punishment of murder to being drawn, quartered, and mounted on a pike on the intensity scale, then it seems somewhat reasonable that a punishment for bank robbing might be getting one’s hands chopped off. If our baseline for murder was lower at say, 25 years to life in a modest correctional facility, then robbing banks might get 5 years or so in a similar institution. Our baseline scale of intensity will anchor how we determine what is an appropriate punishment for any given crime.

Another bias of our automatic thinking system is priming. A study Kahneman refers to shows that individuals who are exposed to words that signify being elderly, even without explicitly stating it, will actually cause them to physically slow down. The same is true with being exposed to symbols of money causing people to act more selfishly. Human beings are incredibly susceptible to subconscious influences, so if, for example, one person was exposed to the shooting of Philando Castile, while another was exposed to the subsequent shooting of the Dallas police officers, you can imagine the views they might have on the intensity of certain crimes and their reflective punishment.

Demanding an eye for an eye is thus entirely arbitrary, and therefore pointless to enforce, yet people clamour for it all the time. I don’t want to attribute this stupidity to visceral animality just yet, so let’s go back to Deuteronomy for a bit.

You must purge the evil from among you. The rest of the people will hear of this and be afraid, and never again will such an evil thing be done among you. Show no pity: life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot.

I suppose that the eye for an eye is supposed to warn others to avoid following the criminal path. Nobody wants to lose an eye; it’s when things stop being fun and games, after all!  Except punishment has never been a deterrent. Harm actually perpetuates the opposite of justice, further destabilizing its already tenuous hold. Plato dismisses harm, even against one’s enemies, as plain preposterous. He compares it to harming a horse, as harming a horse reduces its capacity to be an excellent horse. Similarly, harming a person reduces their capacity to be an excellent person, and if we consider justice to be a form of human excellence, then punishment actually increases injustice. To show its true absurdity, I thus quote: “Will good men use their goodness to make others bad? It is not the function of heat to cool things, but of its opposite.” I’ve explained why punishment is barbaric on top of stupid before, for those seeking greater confirmation.

Plato offers another insight into the eye for an eye metaphor, asking us to consider justice as the settling of a debt. If something is taken, it must be returned in kind. This is a somewhat more civilized version, but it is just as quickly disregarded as Plato says that if someone lends you a weapon, and then falls into a murderous rage, it is not just to return to them their weapon. The context both of the initial contract, and the circumstances of its fruition, are both dependent on factors outside of the contract itself that make it just. A debt incurred out of necessity or coercion, for example, or a payment demanded at an inopportune moment are both insufficient to be declared a form of justice.

No matter how you look at it, eye for an eye justice is only ever an excuse to act out our sickest fantasies. It’s probably why Jesus Christ decided to get rid of it as a religious tenet:

You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’ But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also. And if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well. If anyone forces you to go one mile, go with them two miles. Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you.

So unless you’re Jewish, any religious excuse is irrelevant. However, we still clamour for a providence of violent retribution. A perfect example is Vince Li, who brutally murdered and cannibalized the man sitting next to him on a Greyhound bus because he believed that God was telling him to do so. Li was declared not criminally responsible due to mental illness, and so the population expressed through various comment sections that Vince Li needed to die. I suppose they claim the same right to divinely ordained violence as Li, only they do not have a mental illness justifying their frothing wrath. People tend to place the responsibility for their sadism at the feet of the original victim and their family if not at the feet of God, as if granting them the right to schadenfreude is the perfect means for healing. Vengeance is no form of justice, no matter whose name it is done under.

What is justice, then? Well, I’ve already answered that one. Those of you who have read that earlier article can feel smug for knowing the answer this whole time.

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Categories Social Criticism

A Libertarian Justice System

Apr 2, 2017 //
2

Why have rules when you can let people figure things out for themselves! Libertarians frequently chastise governments for implementing silly things like “banking regulations” to prevent the worldwide devastation of financial crises, and they are absolutely right to do so. The Free Market will decide how banks ought to be run, and if people don’t like it, they can just keep their money underneath their mattress, or start their own, ethical banking system out of their garage! Both are completely reasonable things to do in modern society that will undoubtedly topple the oligarchical banking system.

But really, why stop there? Libertarian principles can and should be applied to all aspects of life. Consider the justice system. A man rapes a woman, and in doing so, his peers would distance themselves from him, his business associates might prefer to do business with someone else, and he might have problems getting a girlfriend later on down the road. These negative indicators would push him toward a non-rape-y disposition. On the other side, if he was too kind to people, they would begin to take advantage of him. After being taken advantage of for so long, the man would become less kind. This invisible hand of the justice system would thus create a social balance without any regulations imposed upon it from any so-called “government.”

Who’s in favour? No one? Shocking.

Like all Libertarian fantasies, we really ought to have started worrying about our ideology when any consideration for the rape victim was tossed aside, but the obvious inconsistencies don’t stop there. Anyone imagining a lawless society has no issue coming to the conclusion that the mightiest would rise to the top to dictate how the world ought to be run, while the rest scrounge to survive as best they can within its rugged hellscape. Our rapist could simply find others who agree with his rape-y tendencies, and if they were strong enough, they could impose those tendencies on the population without any repercussions. He could really just end up “taking” a girlfriend, since there would be nothing ultimately stopping him from doing so. This is basically how gangs work, which are already organizations that exist outside of the law. Remember the ethical banker starting their business in their garage? We can use our imaginations again to see how things would go if this person started offering real competition against the gang leaders in a world without any rules.

This is no different from the banks, or any other big corporation that wants to abolish the rules that govern their behaviour. They want to collude with other like-minded businesses to be able to impose their tendencies on the rest of the population without any oversight, with no consideration for those of us being raped.

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Categories Politics

Being Pro-Eugenics is more morally justifiable than being Anti-Refugee

Mar 31, 2017 //
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Anyone remember eugenics? That wonderful idea born in the United States and appropriated by the Nazis. Everybody loves the Nazis these days, whether it’s relishing punches to their face or supporting their renascent ideals, it’s never been more appropriate to make Godwin arguments. So here’s mine.

Both those who support eugenics and those who are against refugees are trying to stifle the proliferation of an undesirable population. We only want a certain breed of person building a life for themselves in our country, and whether by birth or by immigration, both the proponents of eugenics and the opponents of refugees want to limit who gets to be a part of that privileged process.

Now, this limit to population growth is not done willy-nilly! We’ve already specified that it is the undesirables that we don’t want bolstering our citizenry, and there are certainly measures we can use to see what type of person that is going to be! We can look at predictors of crime, or indicators they will be a burden on the tax system. Those whose lifestyles don’t fit with our current standards, we can either sterilize them, or simply prevent them from entering the country! If these groups of people end up looking like specific demographics, well, we’re modern enough that we’ll skirt around that issue. The first point toward the eugenicists is that they were at least honest about their goals.

Both of these programs are also essentially compulsory. Eugenics was never a voluntary operation, and being a refugee is either facing death or fleeing, which doesn’t seem like the greatest opportunity for complete self-determination. I mean, you could even say that both practices prevent population growth by erasing the potential new arrival. The unborn child never gets to exist, the refugee ceases to exist, and in both instances neither of them gets a choice in the matter. Just sweep all that dirty business under the rug.

Refugees fleeing massacres and dictatorships are simply trying to find a home for their families. All the gays, the disabled, the blacks and Jews and the rest who were forcefully sterilized against their will, they were just trying to make a family for their home. The only reason that people are against these noble goals is because they’re afraid that these undesirables will pollute the purity of their homeland with poverty and crime. Refugees are just as predisposed toward criminal behaviour as blacks, gays, and Jews, I’m sure.

Except, here’s the thing. Nobody disputes that refugees are fleeing out of terror. Nobody denies that there is a civil war going on in Syria. The reasons these refugees exist is legitimate. Even the most ardent opponent of accepting refugees will admit that they are quite reasonable in leaving their homelands. They just don’t want them to come here.

Which means that accepting refugees, whatever the cost, means eliminating a negative. This human being is no longer in danger of being tortured and killed. Eliminating a negative necessarily means that a positive has occurred. It’s basic math. And given that the similarities between being pro-eugenics and anti-refugee are so abundant, if one necessarily bears a positive while the other does not, then being against refugees is less morally defensible than being pro-eugenics.

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Categories Politics, Social Criticism
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