Yes, subjectively. From your perspective, you can justify, to yourself, something based on your subjective view of morality. That has no bearing on whether it’s actually justified, objectively, and has no bearing on whether it’s justified to other people.
But justice is a concept. Whether something is justified is necessarily a subjective matter, potentially different for each individual. So I can say, “justice was served,” but that doesn’t mean you necessarily believe justice was served.
I think I get what you’ve said now. Correct if I’m wrong though.
You are saying that a rule cannot be justified itself.
A rule is (part of) the criterion used to justify or denounce a given situation.
And this justification will be valid insofar as the rule used as criterion is accepted by the people engaged in judging the righteousness of the situation.
Not that either of our explanations are incredibly graceful, but I think we’re understanding each other. Yes then, that seems to be what I’m saying.
A concept by definition can’t be objective justification. As a concept, justice and justification are always subjective.
A rule may be used by a person to decide whether he thinks something is just. And something may be said to be just only from the perspective of people who feel that way.
But then I don’t understand why the NAP cannot be used to “justify action”.
I mean, you are saying that any justification is an intersubjective assessment of a given situation based on commonly accepted rules of conduct.
I also think that, so there’s no problem for me here.
But what if the parts judging the situation feel they subscribe to a mutual understanding of the NAP and that this understanding applied to the particular occasion is such that some perpetrated action is indeed justifiable? Where’s the problem with that?
That’s one point.
But I think my troubles with what you’ve said before are maybe more related to you saying that the NAP merely “defines” aggression. What does that mean exactly?
That the NAP has some embedded list of situations that are to be considered aggression? Or that this list is implicitly defined and can be precisely accessed by rational and careful application of the NAP?
This smells like circular reasoning to me.
What I think is that it is impossible to define aggression, due to the infinite possibilities of its manifestation, and even more infinite possibilities of its interpretation by the different people involved.
You can only list so many instances of what you consider aggression and what you consider justifiable reaction to such aggressions.
And people usually have different ideas concerning specific instances, but their overall agreement on most items allow for some intersubjective assessments of justice.
I think that’s the diametric opposite of what I’m saying. Justification is individually subjective. It doesn’t mean anything except to the extent that someone acknowledges it, and even then it doesn’t have any value in communication except to the extent that others acknowledge it. Still, the primary point is that it’s subjective, not objective.
There’s no problem. My point is that everyone needs to recognize that the action wasn’t actually justified, it just seemed to be justified from the individual perspectives of several people. The corrolary point is that, from the perspectives of other individuals, the action may not be justified.
I can’t fault you for failing to read the entire thread. But I’d remarked that I didn’t mean to say the NAP “defined” aggression. Rather, the NAP is a rule about boundaries on violence.
I acknowledge the possibility for agreement (what I think you mean when you say “intersubjective assessment”). As far as what I think, my contribution would be to clarify that activity isn’t actually (read: objectively, necessarily, indisputably) justified as a matter of fact simply because several people agree about their feelings.