Sure, this may be a lot of such-and-such, but it gets the point across. 

This is a great post! Kudos to you. Very well thought out and very true. The mob-mentality will get us no where. Although it has it's faults, the justice system does act from a higher non-emotional stance, which is what is needed. 

I agree with you as well, :)

And this was simple, but beautifully stated to me..".Retribution is not justice."

Well you may disagree with this, but there is very little difference between revenge and justice.

True justice (From the greek concept) is a real raretyin this country. Maybe it should be maybe it shouldn't be, but it is.

I question your assumption that "the law" and "justice" are somehow synonymous. And further, I believe that your assumption that law must derive from morality is incorrect. "Law" is simply a set of rules governing the conduct of members of a certain society, to insure that that society runs smoothly. Most laws also set out the consequences for breaking those rules. They may be "just" or they may not be. To say that the law is, or should be, impervious to emotion and opinion is naive. (For purposes of discussion I am concentrating on "democratic" countries, that are now considered to be "morally superior" to a dictatorship or a monarchy.)

Certainly, those rules that are called "law" are subject to the emotions and opinions of the masses. If you doubt this, think of these things: In 19th century England, one could be "transported" for a myriad of offences. One could be hanged for stealing a loaf of bread to feed your children. Child labour was not only legal, it was encouraged. To beat one's wife was not considered a "crime" unless you killed her. Are any of these laws the same? Are the punishments? Are the morals? Do we not now cry out for "punishment" of those that virtually enslave young children in factories? Do we not have much stricter "domestic abuse" laws? For an example closer to home, what about slavery laws? How were they in any way "moral"? Yet, those were the laws. What about segregation? Was that not "the law"? How is that related to a "higher morality"?

Laws change as a society's whims dictate. To reiterate, they dictate only what that society deems as "unacceptable" behaviour, and the consequences to be meted out by that society if those rules are broken. They have little to nothing to do with "morality" or "justice". The power of the state to mete out these consequences does not derive from a "higher morality", or even the appearance of it. It derives solely from the consent of the people governed. The society as a whole agrees upon the rules, and the consequences. If the society is immoral or unjust, then so will the laws be.

Justice is another entity entirely. Justice is about fairness, about equality. Justice demands that like cases be treated alike, and different cases be treated differently. As an example of how the law circumvents justice, let us use the example of the acid throwing man, and compare him to another (hypothetical) case.

Suppose someone were to randomly walk up to you, and beat you severely. Although you suffer pain and inconvenience (and perhaps financial costs), you recover in a year. Perhaps you are left with a small limp as a reminder of your ordeal. This is considered a serious assault upon your person. Suppose that person walked up to you and threw acid on you. You suffer pain, inconvenience, and a permanent change to your skin. Those burn scars will always hurt you, disfigure you. You may have to avoid sunshine. You may have to endure skin grafts (which means another part of your body is injured to treat the destroyed skin). This is also considered a serious assault upon your person. Under "the law" the consequences for these two acts are roughly similar. If we want to be "just" then the consequences for the acid thrower are woefully inadequate, considering the amount of suffering involved.

This is when the "howling mob" scenario comes into play. When a society feels/thinks that the law is unjust, then they begin to take the law into their own hands to compensate for the state's shortcomings. When people feel that the consequences for any given crime do not meet the needs of justice, they become disillusioned with those laws. And then either the laws must change, or citizens ruled by those laws will begin to disregard them. Justice demands that the severity of the consequence (roughly) equal the seriousness of the act. This is why people love to hear of "poetic justice", or "an eye for an eye". This is why some people believe in capital punishment. Or corporal punishment.

Morality and justice dictate that this man suffer as much as his victims. The law says otherwise. To confuse the two principles only muddies the water of such discussions. The law is rigid, morality is flexible, in the sense that we have different reactions to different situations. The law has to be general, morality can be specific. No legislative body can envision every eventuality. They simply cannot do it. Yet individual minds, guided by their own morality and sense of justice, do so every day. We, as a moral people, want the punishment to fit the crime. This is why most would love to see this man splashed with acid. This is why we want to see murderers have their lives "taken away", whether via capital punishment or indefinite imprisonment.

P.S. (As an aside) The reason that the U.S. became the "world police" (if they ever really were in anybody else's eyes is another debate for another day) is that you had the will and the resources to do so, and nobody else had the will to stop you. They were content to let you do this as long as your goals were seen to be in agreement with the majority of the goals of those countries/alliances that would be able to intervene. If you ever were truly the "world police" ... Would there have been a Cold War? Would China have the terrible regime it does? The U.S. has always been very careful not to seriously step on the toes of those entities equal to them in resources and will to impose their own goals. Thus - no direct involvement in stopping the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, but direct involvement in stopping the invasion of Kuwait by Iraq (a much "weaker" foe). There was no morality involved in those decisions, merely expediency.

i don't think you can compare the two... u.s.a. going into iraq and the acid being thrown.  they are so different.  although i do agree with you on the fact that it was all about greed going into iraq.  hind site is so much clearer.  the acid attacks i don't know what makes these men want to throw acid at these ladies in the first place so i don't know what type of punishment would fit this crime.  it does need some kind of punishment and my first initial reaction would be to scar them in some way for life as well.  these ladies will have to deal with this for the rest of their lives.  although from many of the pictures i have seen worse acid attacks where flesh is almost completely gone from the face.  my emotions would want to say scar the men in some way so they will know exactly what was done to these women.  but then it probably wouldn't register in the mens consciousness anyway.  because they would probably blame the women all over again for their own faces being scared.  so that wouldn't be a fitting punishment.  how would you punish them?

I'm not sure I believe that Justice is at work for the greater good, I think she's a bit of a bitch ... but I'm not sure how to coherently express that.  Brain is not equal to pen and paper.

Great post!

I posted before that I don't think there is true justice and morality in law. 

Law must make reference to justice and morality to make itself plausible, but at heart it is a matter of simply keeping things working.  True dedication to justice - of the fiat justitia, ruat caelum kind - is not actually practiced, because the end of law is not justice so much as just keeping everyone believing in the system.

@moritheil - It's true that it is impossible to punish them for the extent of torment they have caused. But they can be killed to remove that threat. Too bad you can't kill them, bring them back to life, kill them again, and so on and so forth

@Undercover_Librarian - But if you could, wouldn't that be kind of grotesque?  I agree that on some level the conceptual ideal of justice is to finely and exactly mete out something for each and every wrong, but at what level do we stop and say, okay, enough, let's just deal with the problem and move on?  To what level should we require this kind of precision out of justice, even assuming it were possible?

@trunthepaige - Oh, I absolutely agree that ideally, the law should be properly and carefully written and then followed.  What I question is the nebulous nature of such phrases.  Those phrases are precisely what allow such broadly different interpretations.

My current entry, actually, is on the authority of individual judges and its similarity to shamanistic authority in certain cultures.

@NikBv - I agree with your sentiments about justice being put on a high moral ground. As my speech professor said (he was a jolly wise man, and talked a lot!), "I may want to kill the man for breaking into my car, but I expect society to do better than I would." The problem is "people" in general are not a good source of justice. The people in general are no better allocators of justice than people making free choices on limited information (usually just price--horrible signaling) on economic transactions are good allocators of resources. It is the use of proper and directed institutions, following some kind of governing principle, which will guide our recourse in the face of offense to remain just. It wont be guided by the person, who will be, as you say, having a knee-jerk reaction. It will also not be guided by people in general who are disinterested in the particulars. Instead, it revolves around the institutions which will satisfy our interests on the matters as a collective, and sustain that satisfaction over time by maintaining what we might fail. Our adaptive law is one such institution (and for all its faults, is pretty good, actually). The problem that arises is the adaptivity of institutions to changing conditions and interests (institutions can be slow to change and thus become a burden, e.g., the WTO or IMF maintaining policies long understood to be abrasive to the welfare and sustainable development of poor nations, even after the growing consensus is to change that, or the habits of the market to maintain trans fat as a tenable product, even after decades of knowing its ill effects, before the public consensus could finally change it. The painfully slow transition to a new fuel economy is also another example (we have the technology, just lacking the maturity of a requisite infrastructure to sustain the market). We could have been on our way ten years ago and making real advancements now. Instead, we're just twiddling our thumbs, but I digress.

If my institutionalist rhetoric is sound, then it comes down to the guiding principles. This is where I raise the issue of it even being moral. In many instances, it is simply prudence. Is it expedient. The norms of expedience need not necessarily be moral. This is why law need not follow what is moral, and what is an expedient decision for justice may not be moral. Now, what I raise concern about is your claim that, "you must believe justice acts for the greater good." You've assumed a utilitarian norm without justification, and it wasn't supported by anything you stated. It was the underlying thesis. You've begged the question. I challenge whether it is even moral. Does justice, in this instance, need be moral or is it a case of prudence or is it a case of comparing rules of expedience to rules of morality? Whatever the consideration, we're still left having to justify those conclusion and how we assign such norms to our institutions to guide our collective choices.

In regard to your utilitarian rhetoric, I have to disagree. I'm not a fan of utilitarianism, both ethically and from my study of economics (which classically has tried to make use of it), but I have argued this elsewhere (link). What bothers me is the false dilemma implied by the statement I quoted you. You've essentially set it up that justice either is concerned with the greater good or it is not justice. There's two ways to look at it. Either you're using it in the most broad and general sense that "greater good" simply means "to increase the moral welfare" which simply means "justice is making the moral choice." It still begs the question as to what the greater good is, but as I've stated, and is apparent from a study of descriptive ethics, justice need not be guided by morality. In fact, even from the time of the classic utilitarians, it was seen as an area of expedience (questioning the very foundations of the existence of morality at all). For instance, Bentham's utilitarian calculus and more legal approach to ethics under utilitarianism, was more about what was expedient than moral. I think John Stuart Mill adequately addressed that and made a real moral theory out of it, but then I also would argue his moral theory wasn't even utilitarian (and not because it was underlying deontological or followed some rule utilitarianism--as some have argued for). The fact remains, justice does not necessarily need to associate or gravitate toward what might be classified as ethics proper. It depends on where we categorize the action-guides surrounding the principles involved.

The other approach to "the greater good" would be to see it in terms of an actual metric, which is how the utilitarian approaches it. In this case, the greater good needs to be something that we can actually identify and measure as having increased. In that case, it still begs the question to make the generalization that justice aims for this increase, because that increase is neither here nor there without something to ground it. What grounds this measure? For the utilitarian, this is merely the classic problem of "what is utility?" Since I study political economy I see most examples in this arena. For instance, the IMF policy to increase productivity for some developing country by liberalizing international trade and public goods was seen to be efficient and most expedient. But this measure was in terms of production, incomes and monetary value. Some 20 years after this kind of rhetoric was ingrained into our international institutions, we've come to see it as completely wrong. Not only is the structural adjustment programs advocated by groups such as the IMF or World Bank inefficient, hard to manage and often miss their target, so that micro-loans and small management becomes more effective, but the very idea of measuring that welfare has changed. In large part the work of development and welfare economists such as Sen had pioneered this view. Looking at capabilities instead of incomes, at human development instead of economic development, has changed the way we view the very measures of success. So what is the greater good? If justice is only abstracted to whatever measure and evaluation at some given point and time and parameters, how is that the moral truth? It clearly appears more expedient and lacking morality. The action-guide falls out of the measures and not the morality. The "greater good" becomes so general as to be meaningless because it applies to all things which might be considered good without restraint.

Now, you add that this guidance to the greater good gives the moral superiority of the state to punish those who have been immoral, criminal, etc. I don't see the link without substantiating the action guide in question. As I've articulated above, it's not there and certainly not connected to the moral responsibility of the state to punish. I think MixedUpMale did a good job articulating what is even meant by punishment here. Does punishment need to exist? What counts as a punishment? Certainly punishment need not be brutal, but it might not even be considered a punishment unless it harms the wrongdoer, some might claim. Justice has in one sense always been considered a harmony or balance. If that is the case, then I think we can relate the action-guide of justice to the measure, in the sense that a "punishment" is a balancing of exchange between the wrongdoing of the wrongdoer in exact counter-measure to the cost of their wrongdoing. Of course, that is completely arbitrary, but it establishes the relationship between the two so that a definition of justice as balance relates the wrongness of action to the measure of the expedient choice. In an economic sense, this is what interest has always been viewed as (through different names and different specifics and rules given cultural differences). If we loan money to someone, then it is fair, balance or just for them to not only pay me back the amount loaned, but the "interest" on what I could have otherwise used that money for in the mean time. Today we'd just say it is the opportunity cost, i.e., the cost of what I gave up to lend out the money. But even if we view punishment in this context, as a relationship of balance, it still lacks the moral action-guide. What is the "good" and what is the morality behind it or underlying it? I ask because nothing specific has been provided.

@trunthepaige - Your statement seems contradictory. You say you agree, and then you say, "bathing the attackers faces in acid would be a just punishment," (emphasis mine). Now, maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think his argument was that such an action was just. I think it was precisely that it is not just. It is an injustice to react in such a way, and the justice is that society in general should do better than that. Justice is overcoming that kind of injustice. So how can you say you agree and then say such a knee-jerk reaction is a just punishment? You then say that the justice is not worth the price. What is the price? How is it determined? I know what you're getting at, but it's like saying "the just act is not just." It is precisely that "price" which is saying "that act is not just." The just act is not being too "costly." In context to what I said above, it would be finding the right "exchange rate" so that it is balanced. We still need to know the measure, though.