# What justice is We're all born free, at least somewhat. Most of the restrictions we must abide by are imposed by the people around us, starting with our [guardians](people-family.md). This freedom includes the ability to [create](creations.md) and reap [consequences](results.md) of [decisions](people-decisions.md). People with authority can only grant freedom, but can't impose it. Freedom is a mentality that someone has the ability to explore their [purposes](purpose.md), so it needs both someone's authority to bestow it and the recipient to use it. However, authorities *can* impose justice. APPLICATION: Finding justice in this world can be difficult, and we must be [grateful](morality.md) when we do find it. Most [young](maturity.md) people [presume](imagination.md) their freedoms as "given", but anyone with more [power](power.md) can abuse those freedoms with unfair [rules](people-rules.md). Justice is an attempt to create fairness. People can debate endlessly about what's fair, but we very often know what's [*not* fair](morality-evil.md): - Stealing property someone has absolutely no right to. - Harming or killing others maliciously without motive. - Destroying others' property strictly out of [preference](humanity.md). We tend to believe things we [feel](mind-feelings.md) are right, even if it's not particularly [fair](people-boundaries.md). Since we're all [human](humanity-universals.md), we all have a sentiment about matters of fairness, and can never think [purely rationally](logic.md) on the matter because our [feelings](mind-feelings.md) always mix into it. APPLICATION: The more that justice is perverted from what is [right](morality.md), the less people will [willingly](purpose.md) follow the rules, partly from how the [rules](people-rules.md) are more elaborate, and partly from [distrusting](trust.md) the authorities. This makes *all* life more complicated for *everyone*. ## Purpose Authorities reserve the [moral](morality.md) use of justice to give or take away freedoms. Their purpose (at least as it [appears](image.md)) is to enforce healthy [boundaries](people-boundaries.md) for everyone: - We need authorities to apply justice because completely unrestrained freedom would let the most [powerful](power.md) people [force everyone else to submit](slavery.md). With a powerful authority, other [large groups](groups-large.md) with [other types of power](power-types.md) will [fear](mind-feelings-fear.md) what will happen if they break the [rules](people-rules.md) too far. - We also need third-parties to manage natural conflicts among people who [can't agree among each other](people-conflicts.md). Often, some people are the [victims](hardship-ptsd.md) of previous [evil](morality-evil.md) and feel justified in abusing someone else in turn. APPLICATION: While "eye for an eye" is the fairest universal standard, we tend to [feel](mind-feelings.md) like we must take more than that when we're wronged (i.e., "face for an eye"). At that point, though, we've perverted justice away from [goodness](morality.md). Authorities' judgments will never be [compassionate](people-love.md), at least not in how they're delivered. The most well-behaved of humanity is often abused by the worst-behaving, so fair judicial systems deliver equal retribution for their behavior. The only way to make it fairer is to verify exactly *what* people were thinking as they acted, but [it won't give the victims any closure either way](hardship-ptsd.md). There are only a few forms of delivering justice, and it's based on desired [consequences](results.md) for the aggressor: - Restorative justice focuses on providing healing and recovery for the victims of a crime. The result will be relatively weak punishments designed to direct resources to the people who were harmed. - Retributive justice focuses on delivering punishment for the crime itself. The result will be harsher punishments designed to deter others from ever considering doing the same action (i.e., "deterrence principle"). - One subset of retributive justice is called talionic justice (i.e., "eye for an eye"), where the punishment is designed to be as harmful to the aggressor as it was to the victim. - It's very difficult to have both, since deterrence only works if it's legitimately painful, while restorative justice only works if it brings healing to the victims. - A low deterrence may simply be the worthwhile cost of doing a crime (e.g., a $15 fine for stealing a $100 item). ## Morality All matters of legal justice are issues of [morality](morality.md), with the State being the decider. They are responses to previous moral decisions that people had made, which is why they're always complicated. Small details like a coffee stain or location of a [tool](technology.md) sometimes define *everything* in a court [decision](people-decisions.md). Most of the time, the emotional energy of the [deciding](people-decisions.md) judges projects their own [trauma](hardship-ptsd.md) through the court onto the guilty party. It's not uncommon for someone who performed a small deviance from society's standards to be punished as if they'd performed a severe crime. This compounds if the victim comes from a different [culture](people-culture.md) with a differing set of social rules. Court [decisions](people-decisions.md) often become [laws](people-rules.md), which impact *way* more for years later than the original decision ever could. While [morality](morality.md) in a courtroom is grounded in a unique [story](stories.md) with a prosecutor and defendant, [laws](people-rules.md) must remove those stories to stay fair to all instances. Thus, *[how](logic.md)* a ruling was decided is just as important as *[what](results.md)* the ruling was in the first place. This becomes complicated to track when skillful lawyers use those rules to navigate the [best interests](purpose.md) of their clients, irrespective of [morality](morality.md) altogether. On top of that, each judge has a [bias](image.md), since they're [human](humanity.md). In many legal systems, they become [corrupt](mgmt-badsystems.md) when the judge is [friends](people-friends.md) with or [sympathizes](image.md) with one side of the legal case. APPLICATION: Even when you have an ironclad, [logical](logic.md) case in your defense, it *always* helps to be [friends](people-friends.md) with the [judge](people-decisions.md) or a [highly agreeable personality](personality.md). For this reason, the logic of legal decisions is an arcane mess of context-sensitive circumstances, and creates a [specialized web](jobs-specialization.md) of people who manipulate [logic](logic.md) in absurd ways that defy common sense and exploit [political fashions](politics-conservativeliberal.md) (i.e., lawyers). APPLICATION: Among other things, [leftism](politics-leftism.md) tends to conflate equality with sameness. ## Basis *Where* we get our [inherent rights](people-boundaries.md) has a *huge* impact on the moral scope of the authorities: - If [God(s)](religion.md) (theonomos) define rights, we must be subordinate to that authority, in whatever form it comes, and even the State must give [certain rights](people-boundaries.md). - If the [State](groups-large.md) (heteronomos) defines rights, it has full liberty to take them away and we have no right to protest it. - If the [majority](trends.md) defines rights, then we must follow whatever is [fashionable](trends.md). - If the individual (autonomos) defines rights, there's no standard for [evil](morality-evil.md) unless we designate evil people as a separate sub-human class of citizen, since the "evil" person often feels they have a right to others' rights. APPLICATION: To enforce justice, we must honor a standard that goes beyond the place we administer justice. Whether it's [God](religion.md) or a set of [rules](people-rules.md), it becomes the [philosophical framework](philosophy.md) for how we judge. A judge's job is to define rules to make sense of how to process everyone present in front of them, so they [presume](understanding-certainty.md) the morality basis that fits their [religious](religion.md) and [political](politics-conservativeliberal.md) views. There are two forms of delivering the implementation of justice: 1. The spirit of the standard, by honoring principles. Since [values](values.md) are challenging to maintain without [adaptation](mind-creativity.md), a judge must maintain requires [philosophical awareness](philosophy.md) of the [rules](people-rules.md) they're working with alongside a general obliviousness to [present fashions](trends.md). 2. The letter of the standard, by parsing the [logic](logic.md) of the rules irrespective of its context or creator's intent. This can *completely* invert the original [meaning](meaning.md) of the text (especially after [a few generations](legacy.md)), and is often for self-interested [purposes](purpose.md) or [malice](morality-evil.md). Historically, judges didn't often concern themselves with implicit human rights, so the idea is relatively new. [Slavery](slavery.md), for example, is still ubiquitous but uses other names. A huge portion of the contention about rulings comes through how to [presume](imagination.md) (and therefore rule) in the absence of evidence. If someone is presumed evil until proven innocent then they're guilty without proof, but if they're presumed innocent until evil then some criminals will get away with crimes they had committed. Everyone has at least some [evil](morality-evil.md) intent, so both of those approaches are technically justifiable. The intent of an action dictates *everything* about whether the consequences of a decision are someone's [evil](morality-evil.md) or incompetence. People will usually agree that we must punish evil people and give incompetent people at least some grace, but we have very little to no information to dictate what their [real](reality.md) [intent](purpose.md) was. One mistake many people make is to confuse helplessness with innocence, especially with [children](maturity.md) and poor people. Helplessness comes from someone with no [power](power.md), but innocence comes from someone with no [intent](purpose.md). APPLICATION: By using a jury, the judge's [power](power.md) is decentralized. It filters through the [bias](image.md) of a [small group](groups-small.md) of (generally less-[educated](education.md)) people instead of one person. It's theoretically more fair, to the degree that we can trust the common sense of a group of relatively less-educated individuals over an interpreter of the law. ## Execution Society's definition of "fair" or "equality" is often unclear: - Equal [value](values.md) means each person is regarded as inherently valuable, but never addresses their needs. - Equal [opportunity](power.md) means everyone can create [results](results.md) they [imagine](imagination.md), but it won't be equal [status](image.md) at the end. - Equal [status](image.md) means anyone achieving a [purpose](purpose.md) to gain [power](power.md), for any [reason](purpose.md), will be thwarted to maintain that status. - Equal retribution means "eye for an eye", but doesn't consider how anyone could [feel](mind-feelings.md) with the arrangement. One fascinating reality is that people tend to never have an issue with inequality. However, they *despise* people who created that inequality through cheating or immorality. Unfortunately, we often can't know where that [power](power.md) came from, so we must [guess](imagination.md) at it, which often reflects on our [view of the world](image.md). Broadly, most people conflate equality with [love](people-love.md). To be equal is to have the same of something as everyone else, but it won't fix the gaping hole of unfulfilled [purpose](purpose.md) and [loneliness](people-friends.md) we're constantly carrying around. Many times, people can sidestep justice by redefining [language](language.md). By using a technicality or a specific element of the law to their advantage (*especially* if they can [influence](influence.md) its writing) a wealthy person or [an entire organization](mgmt-badsystems.md) can ignore severe penalties for non-compliance.