What is justice ?
The all-party law reform and human rights organisation working to improve the quality of justice in the UK gives no definition of justice on its website.
How can one reform what is not defined?
The Court of Justice of the European Communities defines its purpose in these terms:
Since the establishment of the Court of Justice of the European Communities in 1952, its mission has been to ensure that "the law is observed" "in the interpretation and application" of the Treaties.
So: justice lies in ensuring that the law is "observed"? Hardly!
These days, the word 'justice' has lost its meaning. 'Justice' is a buzzword used by opposite sides of a contest to air their self-interested views of satisfaction or dis-satisfaction with the outcome of a contest in court.
Justice has only the vaguest shadow of a connection to fairness. Fairness itself, in its wider meanings, has little to do with feeling good after being given money or eating chocolate.
To find out what justice is, that is, to discover its language-external referent, we must take a neutral stance as scientific observers in courts of law. The next best thing is a critical analysis - in the linguistic and logic sense - of published court judgements - the case law, together with the reactions - direct or reported - of those present in court. We must also consider, with a suitable weighting, the reactions of other observers, commonly members of the general public.
I suggest that a sufficiently scientific definition must embrace observations from the cognitive sciences. Here is one such observation:
... experiences of positive affect, although fleeting, can spark dynamic processes with downstream repercussions for growth and resilience ...
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Put differently, because the broaden-and-build effects of positive affect accumulate and compound over time, positivity can transform individuals for the better, making them healthier, more socially integrated, knowledgeable, effective, and resilient.
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within organizations, positive experiences have been linked to broader information processing strategies and greater variability in perspectives across organizational members as well as to organizational resilience in the face of threat
Source: www.unc.edu free pdf
Evolution has obviously endowed us with at least one facet of emotion with high value for our survival. There is another: our sense of moral outrage.
Outrage is an emotion that has three components. First, it has negative affect. That is, it is a bad feeling. Second, it has high arousal. That is, it is a strong and powerful emotion. Third, it occurs when people experience a violation of a moral boundary.
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outrage signals affiliation. That is, while someone is experiencing legitimate outrage, it is impossible to have a reasoned discussion with them. Highly arousing emotional states are just not consistent with rational discussion. So, if you want to express any kind of affiliation with an outraged party, the easiest way to do it is to express outrage yourself. That marks you as a member of the club of people who found that event to be morally repugnant.
Source: blogs.psychologytoday.com
So, we have a clear scientific picture of emotions which are bad for the individual and which can be transmitted socially, as against emotions which are good for the individual and can be transmitted socially. If we add in some findings in group dynamics, we have enough information to make a rational decision as to what might be considered, from a strictly evolutionary aspect and without any appeal to ethics, a rational outcome of a legal procedure.
From that perspective, I invite comment on the following hypothesis:
Justice is a state of positive affect distributed throughout a human group, where the group comprises all persons having rational knowledge of the procedures and outcome of a court's decision-making processes, and where no member of the group can rationally express a sense of outrage ascribable to the court's decision.
