Justice
Quotes
Perhaps, as Kant thought, making transgressors suffer is a truly worthy goal, just for its own sake. But if that’s right, it’s a remarkable coincidence. How strange if the true principles of justice just happen to coincide with the feelings produced by our punishment gizmos, installed in our brains by natural selection to help us stabilize cooperation and thus make more copies of our genes. Knowing how our brains work and how they got here, it’s more reasonable to suppose that our taste for justice is a useful illusion.
Joshua Greene, Moral tribes: emotion, reason, and the gap between us and them, London, 2013, p. 274
Another possibility is that our intuitive sense of justice is a set of heuristics: moral machinery that’s very useful but far from infallible. We have a taste for punishment. This taste, like all tastes, is subtle and complicated, shaped by a complex mix of genetic, cultural, and idiosyncratic factors. But our taste for punishment is still a taste, implemented by automatic settings and thus limited by its inflexibility. All tastes can be fooled. We fool our taste buds with artificial sweeteners. We fool our sexual appetites with birth control and pornography, both of which supply sexual gratification while doing nothing to spread our genes. Sometimes, however, our tastes make fools of us. Our tastes for fat and sugar make us obese in a world of abundance. Drugs of abuse hijack our reward circuits and destroy people’s lives. To know whether we’re fooling our tastes or whether our tastes are fooling us, we have to step outside the limited perspective of our tastes: To what extent is this thing—diet soda, porn, Nutella, heroin—really serving our bests interests? We should ask the same question about our taste for punishment.
Joshua Greene, Moral tribes: emotion, reason, and the gap between us and them, London, 2013, p. 272
Socialism meant planning, not for its own sake, but in the service of justice. It is quite logical that Austrian economic theory, as the most cogent rationale for capitalism, should exclude the idea of justice even more rigorously than that of planning.
Perry Anderson, A zone of engagement, London ; New York, 1992, p. 364
[T]he active rights of man are all of them superseded and rendered null by the superior claims of justice.
William Godwin and Isaac Kramnick, Enquiry concerning political justice, and its influence on modern morals and happiness, Harmondsworth ; Baltimore, 1793, p. 5
We have to stop allowing economics to be used as a trump card. Capitalism is like math. It is amoral. It is good at producing wealth; it’s bad at distributing wealth. Unless it operates within a moral framework it will produce an unjust society.
Der letztere, der die Waage des Rechts und nebenbei auch das Schwert der Gerechtigkeit sich zum Symbol gemacht hat, bedient sich gemeiniglich des letzteren, nicht um etwa bloß alle fremde Einflüsse von dem ersteren abzuhalten, sondern wenn die eine Schale nicht sinken will, das Schwert mit hinein zu legen (vae victis)[.]
Immanuel Kant, Zum ewigen Frieden, Suhrkamp, 1977
Under English law, not to speak of other systems, the sort of commodity called justice, is not only sold, but, being like gunpowder and spirits made of different degrees of strength, is sold at different prices, suited to the pockets of so many different classes of customers.
Jeremy Bentham, The works of Jeremy Bentham, Edinburgh, 1838, p. 134