Justice is Dead
(media.kotakuinaction2.win)
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It never really existed. Justice as we understand it being applied by the state is a myth, one that only a culturally homogenous society can afford to believe. The judges and juries are just humans personally interpreting the law. There's no objective analysis here. It's not science. It's just people giving their opinions. A judge may have firmer understanding of precedent and legal bases that makes his opinions look consistent and wise, but he's still just a guy shaped by his culture, the law school he went to, and his peers (fellow judges, the "legal community", the news media, his friends at the country club). His rulings will tend to fit inside some window of acceptance to others in his culture.
Even in a homogenous society judges will occasionally get it wrong and make a ruling outside that window, angering the community. But over time when you have case after case of inconsistently applied laws that scream injustice at rational thinking people, it's a sign that your culture is too divided to function. Another sign of that is that these cases don't generate universal outrage. Part of it is fatigue from reading so many of these stories, but it's also because a large number of people think that both of those verdicts were fair.
I read an old essay recently that explains it pretty well, even though I don't necessarily agree with his solutions. I used to rationalize the phenomenon away by saying that "different states have different laws so of course rulings will be inconsistent", but that makes less sense to me now than this.
I've moved into the idea that "Justice does not exist" as well, particularly in regards to government distributed justice. All that it can really do is see if parties are effectively compensated when a contract is violated, and basically nothing else. The kind of personal, individual, justice that people seek is to subjective to implement in a system. The only good part of are system is that it actually can force people to compromise, which is the closest thing to mimicking justice that the state can manage.
On a system wide level, this isn't surprise. It's basically Goodell's Incompleteness Theorem.
For any logical system. It must inevitably be complete and inconsistent, inconsistent and complete, or neither complete nor consistent. No logical system is capable of being complete and consistent.
This means that the outcomes of any logical system will be consistent only so long as it's scope is limited; and if the system's scope expands, it's outcomes must become inconsistent.
This is true for all logical systems, including math and logic themselves.
It seems to be a fundamental truth of systems themselves, along with scope. As we expand the law, we must accept inconsistency in it's results. The system becomes inherently too large to be consistent.