The law is the set of general rules of conduct that is supposed to orient the behavior of people in a given society.
A subset of the law consists of the rules followed by the those within the justice system, who interpret and apply the law, and those who decide upon creating new laws or changing old ones, which in modern societies are usually members of an elected congress.
I cannot tell you what the law should be. I don’t beleive there is such a thing as the ultimate law.
I beleive the law is the consequence of this complex process of problem solving occuring in several scales, which in the real world, aside from the ideal conditions of ivory tower models, involve compromises and tradeoffs and less then ideal solutions.
But justice is usually understood as the process of bringing about the rule of righteousness in social exchanges.
A tsunami is not a social exchange, its a damage caused by nature on a group of people.
But if these people were led to believe they were protected against these risks by someone interested in exposing them to or responsible to safeguard them against these very risks, then there might be a problem to be sorted out by a justice procedure.
haha, says the Behavioralist. What is it the 1950s Psych dept. at Harvard? Why don’t they put razor wire on the grips of guns so people learn and orient themselves not to touch them?
The “law” is a set of norms enforcable through the monopolization of authority and legitimacy.
So, how can you define justice? What parameters even come into play?
That is a good way of putting it. some pople impose their “righteousness” on the other not righteous people; the barbarians, with their “freedom.”
You’re missing the point. Book I of Plato’s Republic shows that your version of justice (Repayment) is not really justice, but only a common conception of it. in fact, I don’t think Socrates ever does get to the crux of “what justice is.”
justice is one of the most subject concepts of all. it literally means “what is right,” but who decides that? People’s conflation of law and justice is why legal systems suck so bad. the point of the tsunami is to show you that emotions rule the definition of justice. nature’s justice is swift and, to us, horrible and unforgiving. Why is ours version so bubble gum and rainbows with equality and fairness? I’m with the Ptolemic pagans and Nietzsche on this one.
How does the US establishment react to hurricanes and stuff?
I don’t really know what are you talking about or accusing me of but I have the feeling it’s not very important either.
But you should stop trying to frame me as an adept of any antagonist ideology of yours and start addressing my points more directly, that shall be more productive don’t you think?
Moving on, I don’t see your description of the law as “enforceable norms” as inconsistent with what I said, you could perhaps explain it further.
As I’ve said, justice is the collective perception of justice, that is, the notion that the systems devoted to bring justice about are making good use of their allocated resources in order to reduce prospective costs to law abiding citizens, that is, the types of costs that are either caused by unlawful activity, either by other citizens or by government operatives.
But the specifications of how much resources are to be allocated to do justice, as well as the law and the general criteria for the morality comparisons so to establish priorities are of course subject to change overtime.
A few decades ago, it wouldn’t be unlawful to subject a black person to many sources of humiliation, for example.
Indeed. The substantial differences in civilizational achievement between the glorious Roman civilization and the pathetic germanic tribes start by the foundational understanding of law in terms much similar to those I’m describing here, something that was attained by the former group much earlier.
I love when people dump statements like “so and so is why the legal systems suck so bad”.
“Suck so bad” compared to what?
I mean, they might suck compared to your ideals of cosmic justice, but they almost always much better than anything of practical use that can be transcribed from your imaginative mechanisms.
And that’s because they were distilled by a long process of tradition, which through trial and error sorted out many similar well-intended one-size-fits-all solutions for justice that progressive people like you have proposed throughout history.
You mean at the United states federal level bureaucracy? I believe they traditionally deploy a set of executive orders, but nowadays these things are mainly a responsibility of Homeland Security, through its FEMA branch.
But I don’t know exactly (sorry I’m not american) and quite frankly, I don’t see the point of the question.
Every crime has a victim and every action which is criminal but has no victim or the victim is some vague collective is not really a crime, that is to say it may be malum prohibitum but not malum in se. The victim is the person who is hurt by the criminal action and it is on their behalf that justice must be carried forth. The victim was hurt, and therefor something must be done. So what is the most rational course of action? Is it simply to hurt the criminal, which is of no benefit to the victim, aside from any psychic sadistic satisfaction they may have in seeing the criminal hurt? Why not embrace restitution, which is benefiting significantly the victim? Of course you cannot unring the bell, you cannot take back the assault or violation which took place, but what you can do is force the criminal to benefit the victim through restitution.
Every other system of justice is simply using the victim as an excuse to carry out depredations of their own. Restitution is focused on benefiting the person who was hurt by the action, punishing the criminal in proportion to the offence using the philosophy of two eyes for an eye OR presenting as an alternative, if the victim so chooses, restitution.
The idea that our present legal system, which has been composed in an illogical and ad hoc fashion, which criminalizes a great deal of peaceful interactions between individuals and which is used to rationalize plunder and theft is somehow superior to the idea of a legal system based upon defending property rights and making right wrongs committed against individuals is absurd.
You do not know what you are talking about. “Pathetic” German tribes? Are you speaking of England and its Constitution? Have you read Montesquieu? Or Rousseau? Have you even read the Federalists? This is why I don’t take people on here seriously. It is force of habit that even reply to you people.
I’m familiar with your sophmoric understanding of what law and justice is. You speak as if your thoughts aren’t one or two thousand years old.
Good luck with that.
This is funny too. Remember when I said you were putting words in the whole of socity’s mouth?
I said, “the conflation of law and justice”; monopoly and “right.” I’m comparing the implications of one concept to the other and saying that they aren’t the same thing and are related by people’s misunderstanding of what they are. What is ‘right’ to ‘society’ (utilitarian, consequentialist, ends focused ethic) is not necessarily right (since there is standard of verification). In other words, modern legal systems meld deontological ends with consequentialist means to the detriment of the cohesion of the purpose of melding them in the first place.
I love when people aren’t smart enough to comprehend the things they read.
“You do not know what you are talking about. “Pathetic” German tribes? Are you speaking of England and its Constitution? Have you read Montesquieu? Or Rousseau? Have you even read the Federalists? This is why I don’t take people on here seriously. It is force of habit that even reply to you people.”
I am NOT challenging anything you’re saying here, I’m merely interested what some of the specific insights are that he is missing. I know next to nothing about law and I’d like to know what exactly you’re referencing.
His characterization of Roman law as opposed to the “pathetic” germanic tribes (England) is discussed by Montesquieu in his Spirt of the Law and he refers to the brilliance of the English system, which originated in the Germanic tribal relationships, and slowly spread to replace the ‘virtue’ ethic of the Romans (albeit in a monarchical system). He looks up to the English because he sees the importance of having different branches of government to check the interests of the various brokers (should sound familiar).
Bottom line, I don’t know what time period the kid in this thread was referencing for his comparison to Roman law, but my guess is that he doesn’t understand the evolution of the Victorian system which makes me think that he probably doesn’t know a whole lot about Roman law either since the Victorian system largely replaced it and is obviously foudated differently.
Stephen Pratt talks about Roman Law and Common Law.
I just discovered that he died this past December. That’s unfortunate. I’ve listened to the video above numerous times and enjoyed its insight every time.
I agree that sometimes people get a bit confused when talking about “vague collectivities”.
But still people think in somewhat collective terms when they make their judgments.
They have an idea of the physical and spiritual environment they live and they think justice must be occupied in rectifying the actions of those who attempt against the integrity of those ecosystems, even when their actions cannot be easily linked to any harm caused to a counterpart.
There are many examples to think about.
Like pious communities that ban drugs or alcohol or prostitution, to the problems caused by pollution and other external costs which are byproduct of the activities of a large number of people crowding somewhere.
As I’ve attempted to clarify before, the goal of any system of justice is to reduce a number of social costs to a the class of law abiding citizens that pools the resources tapped by this very justice system.
These social costs are the “injustices” or “crimes” or “rights violations”, as perceived by those who are mutually recognizable as citizens-members of a rechtstaat.
Restitution is, when available, one course of action that effectively reduces the costs and risks imposed by criminal activity on law abiding citizens.
However it’s not always available, as oftentimes the criminal has no valuable to be repossessed by the victim, or the victim is no longer alive or in any conditions to be fully restituted by material claims on the criminal.
In these cases, the costs imposed on the particular victims of the particular crime are (unfortunately) foregone conclusion.
But the justice system still can bring justice to them by applying severe punishment to the criminal, not because that will satisfy any sadistic inclination, but because of the clear message such a punishment will send to all of those contemplating the prospect of engaging in similar unlawful activities.
As prospective felons lower their criminal profiles in accordance to the perceived higher costs of legal punishment they might face by engaging in crime, their prospective victims gain.
Nothing can be done in retrospect to restitute the victim of an actual murderer or rapist but a lot can be done in prospect to the potential victims of potential criminals by making these crimes a lot costlier.
Whenever you find yourself say things like “every other system except my never tested one is wrong”, stop, breath, and rethink your position a few more times.
It’s the easier task in the world to find what seems to be faults and defects in human systems operating in the real world, specially when our criteria for comparison is based on the perfection of our ideal conceptions of what things should be.
I’m not saying that the current status quo represents the best of possible worlds, I’m just saying that if we want to improve the status quo the best strategy is first to understand how it works in comparison to concrete alternatives and to think of an incremental approach that makes it a little bit less ineffective, one step at a time, instead of thinking of large scale revolutionary reboots on the whole social fabric, which ultimately is something that escapes anyone’s grasp.
Well, logic cannot be the foundation of any form of knowledge about the real world.
Logic are just the formal structures and rules of language that we use to articulate statements in an attempt to form a larger argument.
But any argument about the reality will be based upon assumptions and observations that are neither perfect representations of the underlying phenomenon, nor the logical derivative of such perfect axioms.
That is, our understanding of things will always be less than perfect, because our minds and language are themselves limited and contingent to the reality they are trying to assess.
And the evolutions of this understanding are not based merely on logic elaborations of extant principles, but on the incrementation and substitution of established principles in face of new observations.
Furthermore, to overestimate the value of revolutionary programs due to their apparent logical structuring, compared to the less formal systems we have acquired from tradition, was the fatal conceit of many so-called rationalists that in the last 200 years since the revolts in France have consistently formed the vanguard of the greatest crimes committed against mankind.
Bans on alcohol, drugs and prostitution are bad (bad in the sense that they benefit only the bureaucrats who enforce these prohibitions and cause losses of utility to consumers and losses of profit opportunities to producers) and pollution has very real and definite victims, especially once you do away with this idea of the state owning lakes etc.
Not always. I agree with you that nationwide a ban of these things would create a lot of problems, but at the local level these things can be effectively banned.
Activities like gambling, prostitution and drug using tend to attract crowds of undesirables.
I believe many americans prefer to live in a dry county in Kentucky than in Las Vegas.
One of the neat features of the american system is precisely this possibility of coexistence of very different ways of life under the same constitution, and the high degree of liberty afforded to people to simply move to places more suitable to their life styles.
And some people do prefer stricter local laws. It would be as wrong to make the whole country as Las Vegas as it was to pass the eighteenth amendment.
The problem with some ideologues from the left and right is that they believe in their own set of rules a one-size fits all solution, and the only acceptable, when the world is probably diverse enough to accommodate solutions tailored so to fit the specificities of each local group.
The same is valid for things like gun control and abortion. There is no single solution to a country as large as the U.S., but a lot of reasonable solutions to each smaller community.
But still it is hard to evaluate how much each “victim” is being individually victimized, specially since a lot what they consider losses happens in their shared sense of a healthy general environment, and not so much in their insulated properties.
They can be banned, but where is the benefit, aside from to the bureaucrats who get paid to enforce the ban and the sanctimous thrill of forcing people not do things they want to do? Unlike other types of intervention, such as a tariff, which while still over all to be harmful to the economy, that at least has the dubious merit of benefiting a producer in enabling them to charge higher prices for their good, at least in the short term.
Crowds of undesirable? To the participant in vice, I am sure those sanctimonious busybodies who gather and agitate to take away the freedoms of non violent individuals are also crowds of undesirables. To be sure the solution of decentralization, and allowing local comunnites to enact these archaic puritanical customs would be radically superior to the present system, since one could gravitate towards areas who’s customs suited your own individual philosophy of morality instead of forcing the will of the majority or the plurality upon the victimized minority but better still would be to do away with the mechanism of denying freedom to individuals, that is to say to abolish the state and for individuals to interact upon purely voluntary terms. Just because some people feel justified in using the power of the state to crack down on those of us who have, in their eyes, dubious moral character does not mean this injustice is right. It should scarcely need to be mentioned that just because an individual or a group of individuals wants to do something, that thing should not necessarily be done. There is a very specific criteria for action which is permissable and action which is impermissible. Action which is forbidden to all is that which would initiate force, fraud or coercion against another, as is clearly the case in punishing a man for purchasing a good or service you do not approve of, or partaking in a game of chance. Why can’t the desired puritanical sub-society be established by voluntary means, if it is indeed truly desired instead of an excuse for those in power to crack down on their enemies? I suspect that most likely in these busy-body segments of society you would be shocked, absolutely shocked, to learn that gambling (or whatever vice) is occuring, and indeed those who are the most vocal critics of vice are as apt as any to participate in it. But let a community shun and ostracize a gambler, a drug user, a john, a protestant or whatever hated minority (and who would want to live in such a bigoted sub stratum anyway, if you were a member of the hated group) and in that sense preserve the precious paleo cultural, instead of employing the means of brute coercion to reform man of a nature which he cannot be reformed from.
Actually, we can’t know how many people woulde want to live in Nevada since the Federal government owns almost all of the land there. Top secret airplanes and weapons won’t build themselves in secrecy in a desert. I think Las Vegas and Louisville are comparable to each other in population size, but where you want to compare them for being rigidly different in living acceptablity; Las Vegas is where peopel gamble and see prostitutes while Kentucky is where Census workers end up lynched (in 2010). So, back to the metaphorical drawing board…
Of course I’m not speaking of “England and its Constitution” (by the way, the U.K. has never ratified a single constitutional document, but let’s not nitpick, your general argumentation is already flawed enough).
The kingdom of England, even in its earliest medieval stage, is not contemporary to the Roman Civilization, except perhaps in its late Byzantine form, when, as matter of historical fact, it still was a much more complex and advanced society than anything imaginable by the british peoples of the time.
But even these backward british medieval anglo-saxon states, made vassal by the almost equally backwards Danes and then by the (little bit) more sophisticated Normans, had still a large Roman heritage, dating back from the time the Empire first civilized these isles inhabited by neolithic celtic tribes still mesmerized by their recent discovery: the fire.
So when you try to compare modern institutions in the U.K. against ancient ones created by the Roman Civilization you are being completely ridiculous.
My remark on Romans versus germanic tribes was obviously about contemporary comparable distinct human societies, and not chronologically distant ones, specially when one inherit a lot of its institutional technologies from other.
I really don’t see why people feel compelled to project their erudition on an internet forum by dumping some classic works list or required readings that every other user should take upon before presenting his opinion.
If they really feel entitled to a higher level discussion with similarly scholars, perhaps they should seek a more select venue.
Otherwise they sound just like scumbags who’ve skimmed the Cliffs notes or the wikipedia article for some paper they prepared for their liberal arts degree but somehow feel like authorities on the history of western thought.
Of course I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt, as far as I know, you could be a full professor of philosophy in Cambrige University.
In that case I fail to see your motivation in bragging here about your scholarly achievements and being demeaning to all of us ignoramus who did not had the opportunity to receive such a magnificent education as yours. But I perhaps have to thank you after all, for devoting your precious time to spot my ignorance.
Where did I claim to be presenting anything so very original?
You seem to be unfamiliar with recursive notions. That’s a problem when trying to understand complex social phenomena that often have feedback loops.
Well, “progressive” seemed well adequate to describe someone inclined to substitute the traditional framework of social rules for his own system that has been proven to work in his own imagination.
But maybe not…
I’m not talking about what is right to society.
I’m deliberately avoiding all the loose abstractions that generally reduce discussions about justice to an inane amount of jargon and nonsense.
I’m talking about concrete systems of decision taking, and about the incentives governing the behavior of the people supporting these systems in the real world.
That is precisely to avoid the unnecessary metaphysical complications of specifying what means “necessarily right”.
I see the justice system as a real world set of institutions and mechanisms devoted to produce a given result within a general social environment and law understanding.
And by being a real system, it is bound to be inexact and imperfect.
You try to think in terms of abstract ideals of perfection that exist only in your head, but that you nonetheless think are so pertinent that you’re willing to throw away millennia of accumulated wisdom in favor of your own vision.
And I love when people aren’t smart enough to comprehend that on the internet any unemployed loser in his mom’s basement can be a pretentious douchebag with a full spectrum understanding of all matters.
Which is why I asked about Montesquieu. The Spirit of the Laws is all about the benefits of the English Constitution (and in the direction of it in its various forms). It doesn’t matter if they’ve ever ratified one, they don’t need to which is why their system demanded so much respect. Nor does the non-existence of the English Constitution preclude the ‘nothing’ being referred to as the English Constitution (you’ve really never touched a book on this subject?).
All I was asking for is whether you were comparing the in libros populos of “germanic tribes” to the Caesar era Roman empire or the Holy Roman Empire (since it was legal systems as the subject.
Bullshit. you would not have refered to them in the language that you did if you did not mean it as I took it. Who refers to “germanic tribes” except those speaking of the Medieval times? Time-specific terminology would have made your point more clear. I took it that you were ultimately saying that Roman Law trumps the germanic tribes; but you must be refering to what evolved into the English system…and withstood the HRE and the French domination…
So anything that is not in tune with the “traditional framework of social values” is a progressive, huh?
Yes, I noticed that you dissolved the basic justification for a type of ethic by not addressing it then replaced it all together with an arbitrary economic value scale that apparently has an ethic that it conforms to…but it is unstated in a total form (much like the English Constitution).
Which is why you’d get laughed out of any where seriously discussing this question.
yeah.By studying the classic texts (so pretentiously, I might add) Iam throwing away millenia of accumulated wisdom. That’s a larf. I’m just smarter than all of them since I am standing on their shoulders. you are the one that seems to be pulling shit from your ass; claiming ex post facto that you were not comparing two time-distant cultures, you were just using two time-distance terminologcal references to compare them…
Is this you telling us that you are a 55 year old man living in his mom’s basement, unemployed, and being a douchebag on the internet by pretending to be a legal scholar on the LvMI forums?
It doesn’t really matter the nature of the benefit, what matters is whether somebody with enough resources consider it worth the effort.
That’s what the economist studies, how people allocate their scarce resources in order complete their objectives.
Sometimes the goals of different people can be up to a certain extent harmonized, so that they pool resources and divide labor and benefit together. When that’s the case, great, they can work together and make all sorts of thing happen.
But oftentimes, the goals of some people might be objectionable to other people, and the latter group can decide to mobilize their resources so that the former cannot get what they want, and one of the most ancient ways of doing so is through violence and threat and coercion.
Politics is just the modern pattern of leveraging these antagonizing incentives.
And the task of the economist is to try to capture how these things play out, identifying where are the larger incentives and what are the probable patterns of interaction that will emerge from them.
It already a daunting task as it is. It becomes a nightmare if he preoccupies himself with understanding, or even worse, complaining and criticizing, the underlying religious beliefs, moral values, personal motivations, behavioral inclinations, political ideologies, tastes and aesthetic preferences that might be behind the decisions these people are taking.
To the economist, it doesn’t matter the essence of a benefit, what matters is to whom it goes and how much does this actor value this benefit in terms of what he’s likely to do in order to collect it.
The ultimate consequence of a goal is not what really matters. You may think it’s intrinsically irrational or imoral to want to kill someone you dislike, and you’re probably right. But it doesn’t matter much when the real scenario consists of groups having the man and firepower and the burning desire to get as many members of the other groups killed as they can. If you’re an economist observing the mobilization before a war, you’ll be delusionally blinded by your ideology if you bias your forecast on your beleifs that ultimately, war is something “economically irrational”. The task of the economist in the war effort is helping the commanders, predicting what are the most cost effective logistics, tactical manoeuvers, weapons, facilities and perhaps strategical plans and achievable goals considering the existent material and personal constraints they face.
He might present his opinion on whether bombing a high density manufacturing pole in the Rhur is going to be more effective than burning tens of thousands of people alive in Dresden, that is, analyse the tradeoff between destroying material infraestructure and reducing morale and popular support to the wehrmacht for example, considering the constraints and the goal of unconditional surrender of the Reich.
But which one is the “right” decision in a cosmic tribunal is not the task of the economist.
Maybe it’s an important question for metaphysicians why people see somethings as benefits, but to the economist what really matters is that they do and so it really boils down to what they’re gonna do about it next, and then what might happen beyond stage one, two and so on. And it’s not so much his job to determine what are the cosmical consequences for the whole society in the very long run if certain classes of beleifs and goals are sustained. That’s probably the subject of theologians.
So if enough people feel like they benefit from creating costs to those seeking the things they disapprove of, you expect them to pursue their goal and create these costs.
As you’ve understood in the case of tariffs, they happen because some groups do benefit from they at least in the short term, and they are in a position to produce more political pressure than those who suffer from them.A lot of what politics is about is the result of organizations dedicated to impose such costs on their targets. But it’s of little use to whine, bitch and complain about it.
This has been the usual system in America, however the later decades have seen a growing trend on federal government authority, super-seeding states and local communities.
But you encounter more diversity of local lifestyle legislation in American states than in Europe, where everyone is now subject to similar marriage, alcohol, abortion laws, and very similar mandatory state education models.
I don’t consider myself a Rothbardian, but here are my thoughts on this subject. Sorry if this is too off-topic.
I don’t think that logically follows. The victim of murder is the person who was murdered. As he’s now dead, there’s no way for him to seek justice for his murder. So I think anyone and everyone the right to seek justice for a murder.
Given what I said above, I think it would be possible for a woman who had an abortion to be brought to justice - assuming that abortion either per se or at that stage in a pregnancy is considered to be murder.
Again, I think anyone and everyone has the right to bring a parent to justice for murdering his or her own child. The people most likely to know or suspect that a parent has done so are his close relatives and/or friends.
