There is no absolute right or wrong, justice or injustice. Justice is simply what society agrees to, and it can differ from community to community.
There is no absolute right or wrong, justice or injustice. Justice is simply what society agrees to, and it can differ from community to community.
This is what Epicurus maintained. Some people elsewhere in the world think that putting millions of people behind bars and privatizing the prisons they are in is wrong. They think that there are too many people in jail already for minor drug offenses. Would it be fair to say that most Americans don’t agree? On the other hand, most Americans would certainly agree that the idea of cutting off the hands of thieves is barbaric. Most Saudis would differ.
This is all very fine, but the trouble comes when people within a discrete society don’t agree with the leniency or severity of the justice system.
Exactly. I’d take it to another level — “the trouble comes” when people in a society don’t agree with each other, period. Dealing with that reality is what politics is about and from political disagreements flow the problems of “justice,” and of crime and punishment.
In Plato’s “Republic” he makes one of the speakers look like an ass (Thrasymachus, I believe) for saying just what you posted — “justice” is integral to how a people interprets life and that understanding differs from culture to culture.
Some might say it’s nothing but a mantra serving as an apologist excuse, a relativistic justification for cowardice, a cop-out, or just plain old liberal dogma. Some might concede that mortals have an imperfect ability to discern the absolute right and wrong, but to posit that absolute right does not exist serves as justification for failure to seek it or strive for it, and as rationalization for the antithesis, “anything goes” whose proponents pretty it up by adding “as long as you don’t hurt anybody” in order to prove they’re civilized. Or, are we to conclude that a culture whose members are unanimous in the belief that members of all other cultures are unclean and should be exterminated is equally righteous with our own, and suffer extermination without objection? Oh, yeah, I almost forgot; they’d be violating the “long as you don’t hurt anybody” maxim. Except, what if they’re unanimous that this maxim is not right? Who’s to say who’s right about that?
Y’all are gonna send me running back to my Philosophy 101 book list. After 30 years I can’t remember who said what, just that I found the proponents of “the ideal” to be more satisfying to one hoping that human evolution would involve something “better” than dilution to a lowest common denominator.
It wasn’t so long ago that most people thought it was quite o.k to buy or kidnap some poor, unsuspecting West African and ship him off in a stinking hold of a ship as a slave to some southern planter. Such things were fully supported by the churches in the South. Nor can you exclusively blame the Southern establishment at the time. The British, the Portuguese, the Arabs (who else?) were complicit in it as well.
Only a hundred years ago people were talking about “manifest destiny” and the superiority of the white races, and sending Christian missionaries out to the benighted heathens to bring them from darkness into light. You might say that in many ways we are paying for all this now. Be that as it may, “justice was simply what society agreed to” at the time. We disagree nowadays, but it took two things to change the slave-owning culture: a dreadful civil war, where the abolition of slavery was used as a war aim, and, secondly, the fact that the slave trade stopped being profitable to Europeans. Plain old liberal dogma.