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philosophy; justice, guilt 

i've been asking questions off and on the last few weeks about justice. nothing particularly incisive, just trying to get away from tired framings that left me wanting... justice has felt a fraught concept for me for some time and i want to elaborate why, and see what is salvageable in it.

who or what is the subject that can enact justice?
who or what is the object of justice?
what is the method of justice?
what is transformed by justice?

in our society, the Subject that enacts recognized and "legitimate" justice is The State. so what is the object of The State's justice? prison facilities are often called "correctional" facilities. what is being corrected? the actions of the individuals deemed guilty.

what is guilt? how is guilt determined? is the method of justice the determination of guilt? or does justice come when the guilty are punished, corrected, fixed?

here, i think is the first great mistaken thesis of justice in the modern world; the attribution of guilt to individuals, as if their soul is blighted by their actions. as if it's their soul that needs to be cleansed by the unmoving gears of the State's Justice System.

what is the object of justice? well, at minimum, the object of the State's justice is the soul of the individual found guilty.

so far, in looking at our own world as it is, we see Justice as The State mediating a transformation of guilty individuals' souls.

so what is the method of transformation? the correctional facility. the separation from outer-society, and the monitoring and regulation of individuals activities at all times. here, the hope of getting out is determined by those in charge. the violent and armed enforcers who are in coordination with one another to keep prisoners acting the way they want even when an enforcer isn't around.

the method of transformation: forced submission. violence til compliance.

the justice of our world aspires, at its best, to be transformative domination.

how can we ever hope to be free from the consequences of domination if our own justice starts from premises resembling these?

re: philosophy; justice, guilt 

@exiliaex a lot of anarchists fall away from rehabilitative notions if you present them with someone significantly disgusting. they still want prisons or executions, just only for the bad people (where have i heard that before(

philosophy; justice, guilt 

@exiliaex justice is just a word that's invoked when the story hasnt been made "right" it's literally just a product of expectations in social contexts and media. things arent how they ought to be and how they ought to be is based on prior expectations and those prior expectations were set by a deeply reactionary society so the call for justice is always reactionary or invites reactionaries in

philosophy; justice, guilt 

@ZiaNitori @exiliaex
A bit off-topic, but i always thought it was quite ironic how "ignorance of the law excuses no one" is such a core principle in any judiciary system, but laws are so complex that knowledge of the law is literally a career.

philosophy; justice, guilt 

@ja_herre @exiliaex as soon as someone told me you could be punished for a law you werent aware existed i was immediately against law enforcement as a kid

philosophy; justice, guilt 

@ZiaNitori i'm curious zia, do you think there is wrong in the world? and do you think wrong can be righted? (and to be clear, i don't mean any sort of objective and pure wrong)

philosophy; justice, guilt 

@exiliaex @ZiaNitori
Is it ok if I barge in to answer a question that wasn't addressed to me? Don't hesitate to tell me if it isn't proper Mastodon etiquette.

The only case I can think of that seems like a "wrong that can be righted" in a clear-cut manner to me is, in a capitalist society, scams and corporate theft. If a solvable company stole money from individuals or other lesser corporate entities, it should be liable to repay the stolen amount with interests to the aggravated parties.
It is notable that no such law exists in any country to my knowledge, and corporations are regularly sentenced to give back amounts inferior to the one they gained, give a cut to the state, and sometimes send a couple of lesser executives to do a short stint in jail.

philosophy; justice, guilt 

@exiliaex no, i think things are the way they are. coming to know myself and what i want has just put me in conflict with society so i try to use evocative language to express that. seeing where things are likely going and seeing that it leads to the extermination of me or my future kids certainly doesnt feel good but "wrong" doesnt capture that because i just dont think like that. frameworks of wrong and right seem to be predicated on assumptions of agency and i genuinely feel like making choices is illusory. all i can do is hope the predictions i make drive me into a happier life. if when i was in a cage i thought about how wrong it was for me to be in a cage, i might still be in that cage, instead the only thought running through my head was how to escape it. people only think about justice when they feel someone else might hear them and sympathize (consciously or otherwise) and i'm not looking for that

philosophy; justice, guilt 

@ZiaNitori @exiliaex getting people to hear you and sympathize is the first step to gathering allies, though. And those with numbers win in confrontations. The best way to be eliminated is to be alone

philosophy; justice, guilt 

@destroy @exiliaex i think it's far too late for fighting and while i'm interested in finding like minded people for company and generally like the idea of creating sanctuary for people, i think the only option is to hide for as long as we can. who knows, maybe leviathan will show some weakness that we can act on before we're exterminated, but at the moment heroics only seem like a thing it uses to make those who oppose it more visible for it to eliminate. i'd rather those who meaningfully oppose it survive and help raise more cool people, if not for a shot of taking it down, for company that's actually worth having

philosophy; justice, guilt 

@destroy @exiliaex over half of these "allies" are unconsciously trying to steer you and others back into the machine anyway and it's literally not practical to sus out who is legit or not even if you think you have god tier people reading skills. people try to solve a social group like they're trying to pick a lock for the power contained in that community, and the more power it has, the more people will come to pick that lock and they will eventually succeed over time. i dont want to create a locus of power that could attract that kind of attention

philosophy; justice, guilt 

@ZiaNitori in all honesty zia, i dont think i believe you believe any of that.

philosophy; justice, guilt 

@ZiaNitori you don't think it's, in some way, intolerable, unacceptable, wrong, for people to be kidnapped and held against their will? you have absolutely 0 values that lead you to believe that is something that shouldn't happen? something that you want to act to make not happen? something you want to prevent from happening?

you experienced it, thought "oof ouch owie, this hurts, i need to get out of here" and never once conceptualized "maybe this machine is harmful, maybe it hurts others, maybe it doesn't have to be like this, maybe the world can be better"

philosophy; justice, guilt 

@ZiaNitori idk i've known you for a long time and i don't believe you. i don't believe this angle you're playing right now.

philosophy; justice, guilt 

@exiliaex if it were as easy as flipping the switch in a trolley problem to change the current state of affairs i would, but nothing ever works like that. i dont want to rush in to get defeated like every other wannabe hero gets baited into doing. if there is a way to change things it's not going to come from immediately reacting to the situation, leviathan knows how to counter all the reactions it produces. i think that if there's any shot of liberation it's going to come from people who have had enough space from that beast to think with a clearer mind. that being said my life goal isnt the liberation of others, it feels like those desires are mostly a product of media that play into my grosser tendencies to want to fix other people and make them more convenient for me. unlearning that stuff dissipated my revolutionary fervor and has got me more focused on creating my own happiness

philosophy; justice, guilt 

@exiliaex i'm not a monolith, but this is what i currently aspire to be to the best of my knowledge even if there are many inconsistencies

philosophy; justice, guilt 

@ZiaNitori i'm sorry to say, but at this moment and my understanding of what you mean, i can't hope you reach that aspiration.

philosophy; justice, guilt 

@exiliaex how do you liberate people who dont want to be free? who live in a set of circumstances that punish them for trying to be free? i dont think you can fight incentives like that, i think even if it were your life goal to change this state of affairs, the best hope you have is catching the people who fall out of the machine and hoping for a better opportunity in the future to cause the machine to fall apart. i genuinely think "doing communism in your backyard" ie, trying to create a better world in the one that exists is the only way to create people who wont reintegrate into the body of the machine, like a benign tumor with the potential to turn malignant at the right time and even then i'm very pessimistic about the power of it's immune system. to me the appeal of this is not in it's liberatory potential, but the fact that it leaves me in good company. i really want to reiterate, i think this idea that we need to make things right is a very critical piece of social control. heros exist to justify the fantasy of pigs and to get anti state actors to reveal themselves so they can be dealt with and this is how the state exterminates resistance to itself over time. it's just a eugenics project to eliminate all but the most programmable people so the cogs can work together as efficiently as possible. trying to create a space for that difference to survive is my goal because i feel alone when i talk to cogs and i dont want to feel alone

philosophy; justice, guilt 

@exiliaex btw i dont want to discount the idea here that you know some aspect of me better than i know myself, i just wanna share where my head is at on all this atm

philosophy; justice, guilt 

@ZiaNitori

no, i shouldn't say i know you better than you. that was wrong of me. i should've first assumed i misunderstood or that you misunderstood and worked to clarify and rectify.

but, what i'm trying to say, i think is, maybe making things right isn't about being a hero that maybe it's more about showing the right kind of kindness, lending the right kind of hand.

i don't care the terms we put it in, right vs wrong, ethical vs unethical... there are things i find intolerable in the world. i am in agreement with you to the extent that, to a very very large extent we are determined by forces beyond our control. but, outside of absolving oneself of the potential of searching for possibilities, i have never seen a compelling reason to act as if things are purely deterministic, as if i have absolutely no say in the choices i will make.

when someone experiences abuse, say, a child at the hand of their parents, how we, the others around, understand and treat that child can transform how that child understands what happened. and thus, can transform how the child interacts with their feelings about it, and the choices they feel like they have the power to make from it.

i don't believe this is unique to children, and i don't believe what needs to be rectified is unique to abuse.

the violences we experience and the violences we inflict ripple through time. they change us and they change others.

when the police kill children in their neighborhoods that changes the neighborhood.

when value abstracts things, which exist relationally in the actual world, to numbers in a virtual world, and act on this knowledge, under this paradigm, and thus destroy the world around them, this changes those who relied on that world.

we can't give any community their dead child back. the violence happens. it changes us. would it "right the wrong" anymore to inflict violence on those who committed it? i don't think so, not inherently.

if it is the history of the world that determines us, then in those terms, i believe it is the history of the world that can be mended. not in one fell revolutionary swoop, but in every moment. each moment, especially moments spent with others, as the eye of the needle through which the transformation of history passes through by our hand.

if we find nothing intolerable and refuse to act on anything beyond ourselves we have already lost to domination.

philosophy; justice, guilt 

@exiliaex

i dont think that's wrong of you at all. i think we understand ourselves so much less than we understand others around us in many many ways and i want to be open to the idea you see something i dont because i've learned that could very well be the case.

i think that when you show people that a more preferable state of affairs is possible they will try to seek it out for themselves, but the way they've been conditioned to get there is by relying on using rhetoric to amplify their will using others as pawns to bring about a new world, but this kind of behavior can only lead to the creation of another leviathan, it's just another domination game. i think the goal for radicals and people who want to actually live is to exit this game, to become as independent from the movements of the machine as possible, to give as little input into it as possible and take from it as little as possible. only then can they learn to move freely and in doing so create the space for a different world to emerge. if people have the capacity to wake up in the face of catastrophe and famine than they will and this new world will take over the old, but i suspect that this is not the case, and it will only be a world that exists hidden away in the periphery, only accessible to those who dont fit into the machine enough to want to seek their own liberation. i think humanity is committed on it's path to become a superorganism with religious fervor and i think the rest of us animals need to learn how to survive in this dangerous ecosystem and count on our resilience to survive the coming mass extinction event brought about by humanity ignorantly imposing the logic of value onto that ecosystem it depends on to sustain itself.

regardless of my predictions or pessimism my opposition to making things right is a response to ugly things in myself that want to shape and change others to be more convenient for me especially by telling them how them being more convenient for me is better for them too. in many cases this impulse is benign or even positive, just a case of simple conflict resolution or problem solving, but when it comes to wishing for a different state of affairs it really just seems to be a manifestation of impotent rage and my life and relationships get better the more i let those feelings go

sexual violence, sexual assault on minors, lynchings 

@exiliaex

I live in a developing country where the judiciary is known to be corrupt, and we have a significant lynching problem, particularly in cases relating to paedophilia and child abuse. Pickpockets and petty thieves are also often beaten by mobs when they are found out, and a non-insignificant number of them have died when the police didn’t intervene quickly enough. These cases are often exacerbated when the individual is an indigenous person and/or an immigrant. And we also have a known issue of torture in police stations with policemen taking the administering of “justice” into their own hands, and in these cases classism and racism are usually exacerbating factors too.

Given all this, I don't think that the concept of a judiciary system intended to somewhat ritualize the administration of justice and distantiate itself from the primary event is necessarily wrong in itself. But I don't think any judiciary system has ever been able to live up to the more philosophical concept of "justice" when it is meant to be an overarching concept encompassing a whole array of abstract notions like fairness, equity, reparation, reformation, etc. And to be fair, these are all floating concepts that will always be problematic to put into practice, as there is never a single unequivocal way to enact "fairness" for example.

sexual violence, sexual assault on minors, lynchings 

@ja_herre @exiliaex thanks for sharing. English was just fine btw

philosophy; justice, guilt 

@exiliaex

And at the same time I think it's true that institutions meant to administer "justice" and policing are reactionary at their core, stemming from this idea that when a given status quo has been perverted, it is necessary to take action to restore it.

English is not my first language, so I am sorry if I wrote something in a distractingly weird manner.

philosophy; justice, guilt 

@exiliaex

I think the way we tend on the radical left to demand the state administer justice for certain crimes and, at the same time, advocate for the dissolution of the judiciary and the police is often understood to be a contradiction.
But this apparent contradiction is explained by the inability of the judiciary (of all the judiciaries) to enact a version of "justice" coherent with an ideal, more "philosophical" notion of Justice (capitalized from now on).
A judiciary capable of delivering Justice would have held Union Carbide and the US government liable for the victims in Bophal, it would have been capable of bringing effective and adequate responses to rapes and sexual assaults, it would pardon the man who stole food to eat and held accountable the white collar criminal, etc.

And I don't think a judiciary capable of enacting Justice would set itself the goal to "right wrongs". It would rather attempt to minimize as many wrongs as possible with the tools invested in it by the community, provide an adequate support structure to the victims, and prevent preventable crimes.

If we are imagining an ideal judiciary institution in an ideal society, I can see the point of isolating individuals who are known to represent a danger to their community. Usually these are psychiatric cases, therefore these people should be treated, not punished, and IMO the ideal judiciary should defer their case to trained, well-founded and well-equipped psychiatric personnel in institutions designed to make them compatible with communal living again, not to annihilate any spark of joy in their life.

The issue of punishment makes me very uncomfortable, admittedly, and in my ideal judiciary system, prisons would be almost empty. Even in the case of a cold-blooded murder perpetrated by a sane person, the circumstances in which they decided to enact their crime have most likely changed, so I fail to see the point of incarcerating them other than revenge.
But I said prisons would be "almost" empty because frankly I have a hard time saying that punishment should be totally abolished.
I don't believe the generals of the military junta that killed my family along with 30,000 people should have been allowed to live free and rich as long as they did. I think war crimes on civilians should be punished. Maybe that is my answer: the community should keep the authority to punish those who committed abhorrent crimes against the community itself, against humanity. These men were not in a position to come back to power after the return of democracy (well, they were at first, they weren't after a decade had passed) and they were unrepentant but i also frankly don't care about attempting to rehabilitate them. I don't even know what it means to rehabilitate oneself from something like that.

So yeah, it is complex, and I admittedly still harbour a bunch of contradictions on this issue.

philosophy; justice, guilt 

@exiliaex
Hi! I’ve followed elsewhere and appreciate your thoughts, but want to bring up some disagreements in reply to the outlined questions:
First, would disagree that the sole subject that enacts recognized, legitimate justice is the state. Broadly, many instances of recognized justice are individual in nature and don’t involve the state. Often, they are considered matters of personal (mis)fortune or it arises from interaction between individuals.

philosophy; justice, guilt 

@exiliaex Second, would disagree that the mistake of justice is the attribution of guilt. There’s an element of truth to that, but I think it comes from a mistaken element of conceptualizing justice as “to each as they are due,” when what is considered due to those who have done harm is retributive. But, there is a salvageable conception of “to each as they are due” that’s positive. Many modern forms of justice do not center on retribution, but…

philosophy; justice, guilt 

@exiliaex …on the restoration of dignity. But the restoration of this dignity doesn’t have to come through the state apparatus, either. Justice can also be the treatment to which each are due as individuals unto individuals, the preservation of dignity between subjects. The state apparatus in this case can also be seen as unjust in this framework as an unnecessary apparatus that places parameters on treating subjects with dignity. It’s not the arbiter.

philosophy; justice, guilt 

@adhdidact just as a sidenote; can you explain what you mean? what recognized subjects enact justice in our world? i'm not trying to say you're wrong in any way, i'm just curious. from my perspective, state sovereignty can't recognize justice outside of itself except in the case of other sovereign states, in which case, since leviathan exists as territory, jurisdiction reigns.

philosophy; justice, guilt 

@exiliaex
Sure! I think that completely depends: what’s doing the recognizing? If we leave it to the state to do the recognizing, then of course the state only recognizes justice through itself. But I don’t like that. If we look at the linguistic usage of “justice” by people (here I assume that linguistic use can constitute a kind of recognition), then there are all kinds of applications of “justice” that have nothing to do with the state. I like that.

philosophy; justice, guilt 

@adhdidact oh! okay, yeah, i totally think there can be conceptions of justice outside of the state. my initial post is trying to work from the state's conception of justice (i refer to it as "our's society's conception, i think") to break it apart to start to see if there are workable aspects of it for maybe a new conception of justice. it's cool we're on the same page with that~

philosophy; justice, guilt 

@exiliaex I agree, I think what I’m trying to highlight in my reply is that there exists a conception of justice in “our society” that still stands outside of the parameters of the state. I think this is an important point, to use another example, in the Vietnam War many who voiced their opposition to the war did so by talking about not telling the state tell us what “legal” means, either. There was a conception of “legal” in our society at the time that

philosophy; justice, guilt 

@exiliaex when applied consistently, came to the accurate conclusion that the State’s actions themselves were illegal. By such a measure, stopping them from carrying out those actions by any means necessary could be framed as standing on the side of actual “legality.” I think the same applies to justice. “Our society” holds many beliefs that are completely at odds with the justice and the legality that are told to us by the state, and…

philosophy; justice, guilt 

@exiliaex …I want to harness that as a pragmatic tool to fight against the “justice” and “legality” of the state, by using our concepts of justice and legality that tell us that what the state is doing is wrong.

philosophy; justice, guilt 

@exiliaex sorry typo, not letting the state tell us what “legal” means*

philosophy; justice, guilt 

@adhdidact the focal point of our disagreement is about the nature of constituent movements, movements which attempt to hold to some "universal legality" that is shared between them as "constituent members" of the greater whole.

how does a minority group achieve justice in a constituent model while actively struggling against the dominant-population of society's violence?

philosophy; justice, guilt 

@exiliaex Sorry, I think I’m having trouble understanding your question, could you clarify what you mean by a constituent model?

philosophy; justice, guilt 

@adhdidact sorry, my question was phrased weird.

the question, to clarify, is: how can we rely on a notion of justice "of the people" when "the people" are often the source of injustice.

extra info for the question: i pose the question this way because of the way i understood your previous messages about how we shouldn't act like the state is the source of justice in this world since many times we, the people, have held the state as "unjust."

and while i agree with that; there are times we, the people, have held the state accountable... that accountability is on the basis of the people *as* a people.

100 pacifists aren't going to convince a state that their wars are unjust and evil. 100 pacifists can't hold the state accountable for its violence.

the movements which can hold the state accountable are movements which the state understands as "the will of the people" being exerted.

but, and here i will return to the phrase "constituent power/movements/etc" is that, the will of the people, not exactly the same foundations for the state's power and "justice" itself? are we really describing something separate from the state when we talk about constituent power?

philosophy; justice, guilt 

@exiliaex Speaking as a sympathetic critic of Transformative and Restorative approaches: I don't think you can all together escape these premises or questions no matter what your approach to justice. I agree, prisons and executions are off the table. So is domination.

But without the safety of the survivor and a transformation of the perpetrator, you pretty much bring us back to where we start.

philosophy; justice, guilt 

@FinalOverdrive are there not times where the "survivor" or rather the "victim of a crime" is the one that needs to be transformed?

when settlers spread across north america, if an indigenous person attacked or killed a settler, do we really want to say that the indigenous person needs to be "transformed" by the "justice" of the settlers?

this is why i do not believe that justice is about the soul of individuals needing to be transformed. the most peaceful and law abiding settler can still perpetrate heinous acts just by their very existence within their own system of laws.

and sometimes, someone violent, someone transgressive can be, in their acts, aligned more in accordance with "justice" and "restoration" than any law abiding citizen.

philosophy; justice, guilt 

@exiliaex I don't disagree, but this is a case of a higher law being involved; about the justice of a given situation. But once a just situation is established, you still come back to what needs to be done about the individuals involved. And two things become paramount: the safety of the survivor, and the transformation of the perpetrator, which may involve restoration of what they took from the survivor or from the survivor's family.

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