As we have discussed in class and on the blog, there is an essential division between how we conceive of justice in the abstract and how it can be implemented in a particular society. This does necessarily say anything about the feasibility or indeed advisability of adopting one philosopher or another’s system of justice, though in the real world, it is often a distorted and amalgamated semblance of the original ideals that results. This is due to the natural conflict between reason and emotion that continually occurs in each person, and the irrational decisions made with more emotion than logic often qualify as or produce injustices. Plato proposes that the three parts of one’s mind should be maintained in balance but does not specify how to adjust these individual parameters. Aristotle posited that justice is good, injustice bad and that virtues lie between two extremes, all of which are intuitive and generally acceptable principles, but again, he failed to lay out a concrete method of constructing a society where these principles can be implemented robustly.
Kant once again proposed a set of rules by which people can behave justly, but leaves open the question of dealing with the essentially irrational nature that all people demonstrate some of the time. His points are both more ethereal and more practical than Plato’s or Aristotle’s, though, and they seem to encapsulate many of the characteristics shared by the two earlier philosophers. In his specification that there are multiple types of decisions, ones that can be made with no experience and ones that require experience, he admits that the world is not deterministic, and in doing so allows the need for a system to correct injustices created by people acting in unpredictable and unjust ways. Yet he does not provide such a system, at least explicitly. Why is this the case? Is such a system, i.e, one that forces everyone to act with strictly good will all of the time, actually possible to create, or does Kant’s belief that justice and coercion are intimately connected render unlikely the creation of a system that would not engender just as much ill will toward the system itself as the good will it was designed to create between members of the society?
Many of the philosophers we have studied, at least in the works that we have studied, have not been concerned with the practical application of any of their definitions of justice because they have simply been attempting to define justice in these works. Plato actually points out in the "Republic" that the reason his idea of the just society will never come about is because of the fact that philosophers have an inherent disdain for the average person (uneducated) and therefore will not want to lower themselves to attempting to apply their ideas to those incapable of understanding them; and the non-philosophers have no desire to be ruled by the philosophers because of their uneducated/primitive nature. So at least Plato offers up the idea that his society is not probable. He also states that justice is not actually possible because it is an idea and the application of any idea will be flawed because it can never be exactly like the idea. The just society is used as a means of attaining justice.
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