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?

@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.

@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.

@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.

@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~

@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