On 07 Jun 2014, at 03:31, meekerdb wrote:
On 6/6/2014 1:07 PM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
On Fri, Jun 6, 2014 at 7:48 PM, Bruno Marchal <[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.
Met too.
It's an error that Platonic philosophy has passed down to us to look
for "the essence" of something
OK, but that is not the error.
and reify it.
*that* is the error. But Aristotelianism is by itself already such a
"platonist error". Platonism per se does not reify. Some platonists
did the error (like Aristotle with matter), but I don't think it is
due to reification.
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
Doing moral is immoral (but again, even this is "doing moral", and so
should or could not be told. It is in the non communicable/assertable
part).
Bruno
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