Justice

darrow was right

I had an interesting discussion with my friend @wraithburn on Twitter the other day about justice: Can we know Justice? Can we implement Justice? What does it mean to know Justice?

I care about Justice only where the rubber meets the road: where the notion of Justice guides people’s actions. More specifically, I am interested in Justice only because people use it to justify harming others or to rationalize having harmed them. I can see why others might be interested in non-practical applications of Justice, but I’ve got more immediate concerns. If nobody ever sent a man to prison and said “this is justice,” the topic wouldn’t interest me at all.

But people routinely justify harming others by calling it “Justice.”

Prosecutors believe (and it must be true, for the law is explicit) that their job is “to see that justice is done.” And what does a 26-year-old kid, who rode the upper-middle-class-kid flume from Memorial High School to University of Texas to Baylor Law to the Harris County Dis…