Comment by wizzwizz4
12 days ago
There are other stable conditions: law is not the only possible system of justice. Is it in the best interests for everyone if the law steps in every time one person punches another? Law is helpful when things can't be resolved at an interpersonal level: there are situations where a single punch should be prosecuted, so we can't just make punching legal; but equally, if too many things are illegal, selective policing becomes possible, and that's an abuse we really don't want.
Institutions like the criminal justice system are tools. Some can wield the institutions skilfully (e.g. https://www.loweringthebar.net/2006/07/judge_tells_con.html, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-38021839/speeding-drivers-q...), but often, it's a blunt instrument.
I think "justice" is one of those words where people all think they're in agreement about it being good, but when you ask them what it means then suddenly they're all wildly divergent.
And that's the problem.
"Swinging one's fist" is more of a quote than an example here; for an example, consider that everyone agrees "murder is wrong", but we don't agree about abortion, euthanasia, deaths by police action, the death penalty, accidental civilian casualties during war, war crimes, or population liabilities if a large number of each people produce a small quantity of toxin that causes a statistically significant change in the life expectancy of the area. People protest these things, and some attempt crimes to force change on these topics.
Some say it's acceptable to use lethal force to prevent a homicide. Is it acceptable for anti-pollution protestors to vandalise gasoline supplies to reduce NOx emissions? Was it acceptable 20 years ago when we didn't have any obvious rapid path to electrification of road traffic, given that our economies are dependent on road transport?
A while before the 9/11 attacks, I saw a chain-email demanding action against the Taliban for their mis-treatment of women. When Afghanistan was invaded, I saw people upset about that, too (though in different ways, e.g. because the invading forces accidentally killed people by dropping food on their heads or bombing weddings because of the celebratory machine gun fire). Nobody was a fan of Saddam Hussein, but the second Iraq war was even more heavily criticised, despite UK/US leadership insisting Iraq had WMDs.
The boundaries here seem clean, crime vs. justice, peace vs. war, protest vs. terrorism, self defence vs. attack, but the closer I look the more I see these things as continuums.
The world is deep and hard to categorise, people disagree on the nature of justice, and many (all?) people mistake their moral heuristics for moral truth. But there's one thing that everybody agrees on: "justice is obeying the law" is wrong. https://existentialcomics.com/comic/196 (Or https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/legal-obligation/, if you're one of those boring types who wants factual understanding.)