JUSTICE VS MORALITY VS LAW? IT STUMPED SOCRATES, BUT SHOULDN’T – THE ERROR OF IDEAL TYPES OVER SPECTRA
[T]he terms Justice, Morality and Law refer to spectrums, not states, and that is why the subject is confusing to people when it should not be.
Natural Law (logically necessary), customary law (evolved), legislation (commands), and regulations (insurance)
—vs—
Objective morality (logically necessary), customary morality (evolved), normative reality (practiced), moral theory (advocated)
—vs—
Objective Justice (logically extant), Evolved Justice (unintended), procedural Justice (intended), subjective justice (imagined)
Humans evolved instincts for managing the extreme value of cooperation.
Moral instincts prevent free riding and therefore preserve the incentives to maintain cooperation.
Justice instincts do the opposite: they tell us if our cooperation has been accounted for. Cooperate requires sacrifice (payment) and rewards (returns).
Law is the means by which we resolve differences between positive moral action, and individual perceptions of justice.
That justice is simply an accounting system provided for by evolution so that we preserve the incentives to maintain the extraordinary benefits of cooperation is somehow… well, depressing.
So morality is the positive and negative instinct. Justice is the sense of whether morality has been preserved in the face of violation and law is the logical means by which we resolve disputes.
The reason that it’s confusing is that while necessary morality, justice and law are logically decidable, as information becomes less visible and less ‘correct’ opinion’s differ.
Some cultures solve this through authority. Westerners solve it through jury. But to solve it by jury requires a largely moral people. which is why some cultures have juries and other cultures have three judges to make bribery more difficult.
