Justice, as defined by the dictionary, means something that has the quality of being just. That something, must be rightful and lawful. Even though most people know the dictionary’s definition of justice, many people believe that justice is similar to revenge or to becoming "fair" with another person. Justice requires a punishment when revenge comes into play. This means that to receive justice a compromise must take place.
Most compromises are brought to courts across the world. In every court case, there are two parties, the defendants party and the plaintiff party. Because there will always be two parties, how can justice be attained?
"An eye for an eye" is an older way to phrase justice. If you are a drunk driver and you paralyze a man that you hit while driving your car, although you may serve a few years in jail, how is it just to the person that you paralyzed? If the judicial system were to utilize the eye for an eye analogy of justice, your punishment would be equal to the crime that you committed. The society that we live in, makes a smaller compromise of justice by sending people to jail for reduced periods of time. Often times, the compromise does not bring closure to the victim.
Human beings need closure; we crave the feeling that a person who has hurt us will feel the same way that we feel or have felt in the past. We have an emotional side to the things that have affected us, therefore, justice is a very difficult thing to attain. It is nearly impossible to make a perfect compromise with the right amount of punishment that will please two different people or two different groups of people.
Punishment is the driving factor behind why people avoid committing crimes. Punishment is necessary though when justice needs to be reached. On page 4 in the book The Republic, Plato describes that “When a man thinks himself to be near death and cares enter his mind that he never had before; the tales of a world below and the punishment which is exacted there of deeds done here were once a laughing matter to him, but now he is tormented with the thought that they may be true: either from the weakness of age, or because he is now drawing nearer to that other place, he has a clearer view of these things; suspicions and alarms crowd quickly upon him, and he begins to reflect and consider what wrongs he has done to others.”
You cannot simply reach justice in any court case. You cannot undo what you have done. If you deal drugs and get caught, you will never reach a just standpoint from anything in the world because you cause an abrupt change in the way something or someone operates for each use of your drug. If you murder someone, you will never reach justice either because you will never be able to bring back the person that you killed. People forgive and forget, but you cannot undo an action that you have committed.
You bring up an "emotional side" that we all have. I think you're right in thinking that we can never look at justice from a completely objective way, especially when it matters most to us. We can think about someone else's matters much more clearly than we can think of ours.
ReplyDeleteI love the quote from Plato that you chose. Thanks for using it well. In a few weeks, we'll get into a discussion about whether Hope or Fear is a more powerful emotion. This will play a lot into it.
You also do a great job with expressing the fact that no punishment can "reset" the world to the way it was before a transgression occurred. It's what makes justice even more difficult to achieve. Maybe we need to invest more into the teaching of maintaining justice in the world before we have the need for the false justice of courts and law. Would that help? How would we do that in our schools?