Justice is our deliverance from species insanity and trivialization
Otherwise, hormonal lusts will bring misery and extinction
H.G. Wells commented that, “Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.”
That observation leaned in the right direction, but was still materially deficient. Great evils and wickedness have been perpetrated by persons of great learning or talent. The Nazi defendants at Nuremberg were not unlearned. Neither was Adolf Hitler nor Mao Zedong nor Vladimir Lenin. The best and the brightest engineered the racist Japanese-American concentration camps and the Vietnam War.
Intellect without character is as dangerous as a child with an AK-47. And character means possessing a hierarchy of values that rations your time.
It is self-evident that justice is the summum bonum of life. It gratifies the reflective, cerebral faculties without ulterior motives. Justice cannot be defined with the exactitude of mathematics. But it can be defined with tolerable chiaroscuro. It means summoning power, influence, and wisdom with the goal of making everyone’s station in life and happiness correspond to their industry, ambitions, and character, simpliciter. Race, gender, religion, nationality, place of birth, or consanguinity should be irrelevant.
Perfect justice is impossible. Humans do not all start at the same line. No one chooses their parents, their place of birth, their upbringing including siblings, food, medicine, and intellectual stimulation at early ages. Those aspects of individual opportunity or development are flukish like lottery tickets. Knowing what magnitude of advantage of handicap to assign to each element in each individual case is galaxies beyond our ken.
Seeking optimal albeit imperfect justice is devotion by tireless advocacy and example to having everyone’s station in life determined by accomplishments and character alone. Nothing else should count. The world will be better off even if only one person lives their life accordingly. There will never be another Socrates. But that one did more to emancipate the mind from the tyranny of dunces and moral derelicts than the rest of mankind combined.