On 6/6/2014 1:07 PM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
On Fri, Jun 6, 2014 at 7:48 PM, Bruno Marchal <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On 06 Jun 2014, at 13:23, Telmo Menezes wrote:
Dopamine is not justice,
Sure. "Justice" is a superstition.
Then truth, beauty, and all protagorean virtues becomes superstition.
I might be out of context, but I am not sure what you mean by "justice" is a
superstition. It might be an ideal, but like we can know very well what is
pleasant
and what is non pleasant, we can in situation understand what is just and
what is
non just, even if a large part of it is first person and hard to delimited
with words.
To believe in a guy bringing justice can be a superstition though. But most
of our
laws are good, if they were applied and not jeopardized by multinationals,
corporatism and special interest.
The protagorean virtue can still be taught by examples (myths, legends,
movies,
arts, ...) and are open to improvement or to a generalization of "harm
reduction".
100%-just might be a superstition.
I meant in the context of punishment and retribution. I don't believe that there is some
magical property of "justice" that is increased by causing harm to someone, making
punishment or retribution intrinsically good actions.
So, to be more precise. Suppose you write a book and someone steals it and publishes it
under their name. They make a lot of money and gain recognition by stealing from you. It
is good that the person is caught, made to give you the money and that you receive the
due recognition for your own work. Maybe the person should be sent to jail, to dissuade
this type of behaviour. I don't question any of this. But people then refer to justice
as things like: the person who stole your book should suffer in jail, or be publicly
flogged or suffer in some way. And this suffering restores justice. This is the part I
think is superstition.
I agree. It's an error that Platonic philosophy has passed down to us to look for "the
essence" of something and reify it.
A thought experiment. Let's imagine that it turns out that making murder legal actually
minimises the number of murders. There are still 3 or 4, but any penalty raises it to
the hundreds. The sort of justice superstition that I allude to would mandate that there
should be a penalty, because having the 3 or 4 murderers unpunished is unacceptable. A
less extreme version of this happens with the Swedish experiment with more comfortable
jails. They are noticing a decrease in criminality, but most of the world cannot accept
such an idea because they are not comfortable with less retribution, even at the expense
of more actual crimes.
Right, the object of the "justice system" should be to make society better. It only began
with the idea of retribution because the state needed to take away the motive for private
revenge by substituting socially mandated retribution. As people become more rational the
demand for revenge is diminished (but not eliminated).
Sam Harris has invited essays criticizing his idea of a science of morality and the best
one is posted on his web site along with Sam's reply. It may be of interest.
http://www.samharris.org/
I think the subject would be much clarified if a distinction was made between personal
morality and social ethics.
Brent
"The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises
in moral philosophy: that is, the search for a superior moral justification for
selfishness."
--- John Kenneth Galbraith
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