What Killed Justice?

Note: This blog is primarily about the American justice system, but the concepts also pertain to standards in all forms of governance, including corporate governance structures. Once leaders ignore a standard and the enforcement mechanism does nothing, the standard changes. Turning back to the legal system, we see the same thing with speed limits, theft, and increasingly violent crime. The legal system turns a blind eye, either does not prosecute or gives lenient bail and just a light slap on the wrist. Several companies have fired employees who tried to prevent theft. See, for example, an incident at a Westminster Circle K store.

This post continues on Truth, Justice, and Integrity: Leadership, which introduced the Truth, Integrity, and Justice framework. In that post, I wrote, “Justice ensures that individuals receive what they are due, whether in terms of rights, responsibilities, or consequences.” That is a classic legal definition. In Book V of Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle wrote, “Justice is often thought to be the greatest of virtues”.

Perhaps “killed” in the title may be an extreme term, but not by much. But if justice is not dead, it may be on life support. Justice has always had some quirks and inconsistencies in virtually every human civilization. While the archetype of Justice may be a Greek Titan—Themis—its implementation is human and often flawed. So, what killed it, or at least gravely wounded it? Culture in several forms.

This blog provides a progression of four cultural aspects that lead to the death of justice. The first is a selection of original thoughts on justice from Plato, Aristotle, and other ancient philosophers. These form the basis of Western philosophical and political thought. The second is television. The third is socialism and its various spin-offs. The social justice movement, which fired the arrow into Justice’s back, draws in these three forms. These are all significant cultural shifts.

In The Republic, Plato wrote of the difference between arithmetic and geometric justice. Arithmetic is essentially the common legal definition. Proportional justice considers social classes, creating a stratified concept of justice rather than a universal one. In The Republic, he wrote,

“Justice, like the ideal state, therefore, it demands the division of society into three classes representing the elements of reason, spirit and appetite, one man, one work, based on functional specialization, a state-regulated scheme of education, the rule of philosopher–rulers and their emancipation from domestic and economic worries by a system of communism, and emancipation of women and their equality with men.”

Plato was writing of a utopian society under which the stratified concept of justice might work. Most of us, however, do not live in a utopian society. But there are people, often academicians and increasingly leftist politicians, who still push utopian concepts, even though they have never worked in practice for more than a short period. Stratified justice, as proposed by Plato, is, I suspect, the root of the modern social justice movement, which is essentially a utopian concept. Plato’s stratified justice provides a theoretical underpinning for it. But modern social justice is different concept of justice based on the preferred or non-preferred group that may shift according to political winds.

The television attack on justice started in 1957 with Divorce Court. This show turned the courtroom into entertainment. It started the popular erosion of respect for the law and turned it into a common spectacle. The concept of justice as a spectacle, however, did not originate with television. We can see it in the Roman circuses when convicts were executed for entertainment and follow it through history when crowds watched executions. Divorce court, however, exacerbated this trend by adding the court process itself to an entertainment venue. Judge Judy and similar shows follow the Divorce Court path and take more aspects of the law into entertainment.

Now, let us turn to Bull and Boston Legal. Bull was essentially a show about jury manipulation. It did, however, bring some key modern legal concepts to the public. There were a few episodes, however, where the TAC team essentially asked the jury to ignore the law and not convict. Boston Legal took it to an even higher level with plenty of courtroom antics, marginally qualified judges, and again asking the jury to ignore the law. While Boston Legal was a comedy, it attacked the legal system with a frequent litany that was too much to ignore.

The third element is socialism, which, like its sibling communism, is largely a utopian idea that works only as long as there is sufficient wealth to redistribute. As Margaret Thatcher, former Prime Minister of Great Britain, said, “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.” Socialism violates the basic definition of justice by taking wealth and property from those who earned it, or perhaps inherited it, and giving it to others who did not. This violates arithmetic or classical justice framed within a utopian construct where everyone supports the distribution of assets. As Karl Marx wrote, “From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs.” Gramsci, an Italian communist, took this into the cultural domain with his concept of cultural hegemony.

The last element, social justice, builds on the previous three and weaves them together. Plato’s stratified justice provides the theoretical framework for social justice. The strata, however, are now selected social classes and groups. A lack of respect for the traditional American concept of justice makes it easier to twist it and create a new concept that is the antithesis of traditional justice. It takes the blindfold off the judicial system and says that justice is no longer a generalized ideal that applies to all, regardless of identity, but now depends on identity. Social justice provides the practical governance structure to make the change and apply the new concepts. It takes Marx’s concept and uses current government structures to make it happen. Unlike the Leninist and Maoist revolutions, it is a revolution without war.

So, to paraphrase Lenin, what is to be done?

Follow-on blogs will explore this concept, but the keys are culture and education that teach virtue and critical thinking, concepts I have addressed in many blogs on greenmanhouse.net.