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. 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. Telmo. > > Bruno > > > > http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ > > > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Everything List" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
