Crash Course Ideas on the Philosophy of Justice (Reaching High With Empathy)

Allegory or The Triumph of Justice
Hans von Aachen
1598
The picture represents
what each person in a nation owes to 
the other in terms of
justice.

Here is a crash course on justice. Philosophical discussions are philosophical and they keep things on a very high level. When it comes to the details of justice things get a lot more murky. This is also likely why it seems to be a hot topic of discussion as of late. When we learn and understand about ethics and justice we become to gain a better understanding of how that works in our lives, relationships, human resources, and society.

As always we should seek the higher moral order. We want to ensure we are not neglecting our bigger laws and contracts for lower order values. I guess in many ways we could say the same thing about ensuring our laws strive toward the highest sense of justice. Its a mater of lofty over the hill thinking but also a necessary one for the next generation.

(Bigger laws and contracts might include, Constitution, Bill of Rights, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Religion, so on and so forth. Most of these were written by gifted individuals that had both high critical thinking and moral sensitivities. They had a deep sense of justice and thought about these things regularly.)

Empathy allows us to reach to the higher values more easily than is possible by those who lack empathy (Empathy has been in scientific studies and it has been used historically thematic in our artifacts such as ethics, religious texts, movies, music, poetry, sagas, etc.). Empathy can better see how injustice impacts other people and how it fundamentally creates feelings of mistreatment. To avoid that we must always seek the higher order. Justice higher then injustice, empathy higher than intentional harm, truth higher then lies, so on and so forth. 

Encouraging justice means being truthful and objective in a way that leads to higher levels of integrity that further builds trust. When integrity is consistently high it means accuracy and objectivity lead to increased fairness (i.e. must have empathy first to truly understand fairness). Do that long enough and you have trust. Have enough instances of trustworthy acts and you have credibility and what others perceive as integrity.

Inability to act with integrity consistently would indicated that one must adjust the processes and procedures to better ensure the higher order concepts are much more likely to be repeated/encouraged. It makes no difference what kind of entity you are discussing. Empathy allows us to seek higher forms of justice and it also allows us to change to meet those expectations of trust. It is through the process of self reflection and change that we create consistency of justice so as to support long term trust.

• 'The measure of intelligence is the ability to change' -Albert Einstein.
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