Justice: the most important thing

Empires have been forged and overthrown, slaves have been captured and liberated and wars have been waged by all parties in her name.
Justice might be the most powerful idea, the most potent driver of human beings.
I’d be hard pressed to find something more people have willingly risked and lost their lives for. (Okay, maybe the mating drive takes the top spot)

Justice might also be the most evenly distributed virtue. Everybody thinks they are on her side. (Okay, maybe it’s only second to intelligence)

What’s going on here?

I have ponderd the topic for a long time. It has been a deeply moving experience to be able to see different versions of justice as true.
I am still able to get into the mindset of my 16 year old socialist self and I can still see the exploitation all around me. And I can also take on the perspective of my 25 year old libertarian self and bemoan the suppression of the most productive parts of our society by oppressive state agents that use the threat of violence to extract money, keep the most for themselves and distribute some crumbs to the masses to make them dependent on handouts and willing potential goons.

The ability to switch between these opposing filters and look at the same world, the same facts and come to radically different conclusions about it, to be able to switch between different versions of reality that “feel” completely coherent, makes me still stop in my tracks from time to time.

My current opinion about it: It’s a shared hallucination, something we use in societies as a mental crutch to imbue certain ideas and principle with special importance.
It’s not real.

Just like moral norms are decision and not facts of reality, justice is a decision and not a fact of reality.

Let’s look and example: a CEO is making 250x what of what nurse makes.

If you think people should be compensated according to much effort they put into their job and nobody should earn way less than somebody else, it’s glaringly unjust, isn’t it? “How can anybody be worth so much? Does the CEO really work 250x as hard?”
It’s obviously exploitative power!
If you think the salary should be set accoording to the value of work and that we the people should determine that value collectively via the market, you will find nothing wrong with it.
It’s obviously the result of voluntary transactions.

Or for a possibly even more controversial topic: death penalty.

“If you have taken a life, yours has to be taken as well. It’s ‘an eye for an eye’”, the proponent might say. “It’s justice. Plain and simple”
“An eye for an eye makes the world go blind!”, the opponent might chime in. “Two injustices don’t cancel out!”.
So what’s happening here? I think the opponent might have decided that there should be a symmetric punishment for the act of murder.
The opponent might have decided that we shouldn’t take a life, no matter what.

Justice doesn’t seem to be more than different assumptions about how things should be handled.

Wow, let that sink in! Justice, the most potent driver of humanity (except for the mating), seems to be a product of chance. I am not saying that it’s totally arbitrary or that different concepts of justice don’t produce measurable differences in outcome. Like most things human, it looks like our moral systems have evolved: ideas came up and were tested. We discarded (most) of what didn’t work and kept the rest.

But nonetheless, I experienced that realization as shocking and destabilizing. If there aren’t any objective standards of justice to adhere to, how do we determine, who is right? Is there even a “right”?

I don’t believe there is. I am not saying there isn’t, I am saying that I have not seen it.

I wish there were. It’d make things much easier! I know that absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence, but if 6 millenia of contemplating by the greatest scholars all around the world weren’t able to zero-in on it, I’ll allow myself to take another route: When contemplating justice, I stopped asking: “What’s right? What’s true?” and switched to: “What’s useful?”

Isn’t that an awful thing to say? Isn’t it “denigrating” to the “pristine” idea of justice? Maybe. But on the plus-side: you know that my conception of justice is man-made and aims to setup a system that helps to improve people’s lives.

It’s not holy, neither sacred tradition, nor immutable. We can talk about it.

I am actually looking forward to hearing all the ways it is wrong; if it produces undesirable consequences, we are free to change it and create something better. Wouldn’t that be nice?!

The topic is too vast for a single blog post, so I will use this post as anchor and link to the posts as I write them.

Spoiler Alert:
Of course, there have been great works on the topic and I’d like to discuss a few of John Rawls‘ ideas described in his “A Theory of Justice”.
As you can see from my currently pinned tweet, I think a roughly Rawlsian programm for just institutions will be a tremendously useful starting point.
Obviously, we need to test these institutions as small as reasonably possible and make piecemeal increments to what we already have. That will take a lot of time.

We better get going!