We Must Say No To Thirsty Justice

0:00Welcome back for cop time. We have got a big topic to cover today before getting started. I have got a live workshop coming up that I want you to know about. It's going to cover stoicism as a complete life philosophy and explain how it can be implemented that way. This is where a lot of people really struggle with stoicism. They understand the benefit. They understand the texts or at least they've read them, but they don't exactly know how the rubber meets the road. That's what this workshop is for. It's May 9th. Please don't miss it. For the next few days, there's early bird pricing, so if you're hearing this within a couple days of me releasing it, I would advise you to act quickly. Find the event and register at tanerocambell.com forward slash May as in the month of May or just click the link in the description of this episode. Spots are limited and I'm looking forward to seeing you there. So one more time, check the description for a link to register or go to tanerocambell.com forward slash May.

1:11The stoic concept of justice is all together different than the justice of our modern legal systems. It doesn't set out to concern itself with the same things at all. Consider this from Marcus Aurelius and then the one after from Cicero. He who acts unjustly acts impiously for since the universal nature has made rational animals for the sake of one another to help one another according to their desserts, but in no way to injure one another, he who transgresses her will is clearly guilty of impiety towards the highest divinity. That's meditations 9.1 and this from Cicero. Of the three remaining divisions, the most extensive in its application is the principle by which society and what we may call its common bonds are maintained. Of this again, there are two divisions, justice in which is the crowning glory of the virtues and on the basis of which men are called

2:15good men and close akin to justice charity which may also be called kindness or generosity. The first office of justice is to keep one man from doing harm to another unless provoked by wrong and the next is to lead men to use common possessions for the common interests, private property for their own. Again, that's Cicero, deophysis1.20. As present day humans, we hardly ever think of justice the way that the Stoic state, but we are concerned with instead is something more like retribution or the metting out of appropriate punishment to those who we believe deserve it. Also, of course, the metting out of appropriate reward to those who we believe deserve it. I want to spend the duration of this episode articulating exactly how our departure from this more orthodox understanding of justice is perhaps at the very root of the breaking down of social cohesion in the West at least that we are presently witnessing and have been witnessing for the last

3:16few decades at least. My hope is that you will walk away from these next few minutes with a change and perspective and a personal motivation to modify your own behavior from here forward. If indeed, you decide you need to. Justice, some say, is the most important of the cardinal virtues. This is not true, of course. It is just as important as the others and each influences the rest equally, but such people, and Marcus Aurelius, is not among them regardless of what some popular Stoicism communicators may tell you, such people say that without justice, one can do nothing else right because the reason that justice is the virtue that orients every action toward its proper relational object so that when it is absent, the other virtues lose their terminus and collapse into their counterfeits. Courage turns into mere bravado, temperance into private self-management with no concern for the whole, with a cosmopolis, and wisdom into the sharp edge cleverness the Greeks

4:22called panorgia. In the view of these individuals, justice alone tells the other virtues what they are for, so that without it, the practitioner may still look courageous, temperate or shrewd, yet none of those performances will be a virtue in the proper sense because they will have been severed from the social nature of the rational animal to which, as the Stoics insist, all right action is ultimately referred. Again, this is technically wrong. The Stoic thesis of Antikothea says that you cannot have a hierarchy of the virtues. Now, I admit this is a little bit too deep in the weeds of orthodoxy and theory to make a fuss about, and so I'm not going to. However, one can absolutely see what such people mean, and even feel comfortable saying they have some sort of point. I feel comfortable saying that, for example. And I think that this comes from a very long tradition of a particular human disgust that people should not be given what they do not deserve.

5:26In some ways, there is nothing more upsetting to us than when a person gets a benefit they don't deserve, or likewise, when a person gets a struggle they don't deserve. Jerks become wealthy, and that's upsetting. Kindhearted souls get diagnosed with cancer, and that's upsetting. We're always and forever asking ourselves, why do bad things happen to good people? And of course, the inverse of that as well. There's just something about someone getting what they shouldn't get, whether it benefit or a detriment, that really rubs us the wrong way. And this seems to go across cultures. In our modern legal systems, at least here in the West, we can still see this disgust, and I'm going to explain how in a moment we still see it, but before I do, I want to make sure that you understand something. There is probably no more vicious an outcome from the perspective of Stoics and Stoic Ethical Theory than giving a person what is inappropriate to give them. In Stoicism, we are not concerned with giving people what they deserve, like a reward

6:30or a punishment, so much as we're concerned with giving them what they're owed as a member of the cosmopolists, and as part of the natural world and natural order. There is a way to treat one another. And as I said, there is probably very little which could be said to be worse behavior, as far as the Stoics would be concerned, than not to give someone what they are owed in our dealings with them. It is a moral error of the highest water. Now, how do we see this in the modern justice systems of the West? We see it in a core belief that there is no greater miscarriage of the law than to assess an innocent party as guilty. Numerous are the stories of, for example, black men in America who have been accused of rape, found guilty, imprisoned for decades, only to be exonerated by DNA testing after so much of their lives have been spent in confinement.

7:31People such as Vincent Simmons, Ronnie Long, the Groveland Four, the list is pretty substantial, and it's not just black men, and it's not just for crimes as heinous as rape, but these cases, in particular, make our blood curtle, and I'm using them as examples here because they're very obvious examples. We can feel the rage in this miscarriage of justice. We feel like, as people, or as a people, I should say, we have done something unspeakably cruel in these cases. We have taken nearly an entire life from someone and we have done it wrongly. It would be better, and I think we all agree, for a murderer, for example, to go uncaptured than it would be for an innocent person to be found erroneously guilty of murder and then locked away for life or worse executed. And if not for any of the reason then, having locked up the wrong person, the truly guilty party has gotten away with their crime anyway. The only difference is that now there's an additional travesty, and I would say, perhaps you would as well,

8:37a worse one, since it would be an ongoing and continuous travesty. But this instinct that the system must be biased toward protecting the innocent is facing increasing challenge among members of the public. And not because anyone has mounted a principled argument against it, but because it has been eroded by something older and less reasoned, the raw appetite for a culprit. We used to ask, and care about the answer we'd receive from asking, did this person do the thing we're about to punish them for? But we are now far more likely to ask something like, is this person sufficiently adjacent to the thing that punishing them will feel like justice? And while we're not literally asking this question, because asking it that way would confront us immediately with our thirsty for a culprit bias, we, by all accounts, are thinking this way more and more frequently. And this is absolutely dissolving some of the connecting glue of our societies.

9:42And you can feel it in the tenor of any public controversy that reaches a certain pitch. Someone is accused, a camp forms, and very quickly the question stops being about what actually happened and becomes about which side we're on. Evidence is no longer something to be weighed, but something to be enlisted, used only when it helps, and discarded only when it doesn't, or ignored entirely. Not only did the accused become vessels for the accumulated frustrations of whoever is doing the accusing, but the number of accused individuals seems to be multiplying by the day. We're no longer just thirsty to punish anyone who's been accused already, we seem thirsty for more people to accuse and punish in the first place, to find as many people as as possible, to hold accountable for the state of the world that we view is currently going to pot around us. And so the bar for what actions are worthy of condemnation, accusation, and punishment

10:49has gotten lower and lower and lower. We're now, for example, happy to ruin a person's career, simply because they hold a view of how things ought to be that starkly contrasts with our own. We have, as I'm sure you're aware, literal Nazis everywhere who are absolutely not literal Nazis, although, and I admit, this can be difficult to navigate since there are also, in fact, literal Nazis seemingly everywhere, but it's important to pick these things apart. And this is the very thing that stoic justice would have us attend to with the most pain-staking care because giving each person what is owed to them requires actually knowing what is owed in the first place. But we rarely seem willing to do that work these days. What matters to us instead is that someone pays and that the paying be visible and that it be visible soon. This is a particular kind of moral failure in stoicism. It's not injustice in the ordinary sense of wanting to harm

11:51someone but injustice as a failure of our own attention, a refusal to do the patient work of looking at the actual situation before the verdict is meted out, the verdict and the punishment that is. We cannot give each person their due if we will not first find out what is due. After this episode completes and you go back to doing whatever it is you were doing before you hit play or whatever the rest of your day looks like, whatever you're going to be doing, here's what I'd like you to do. The next time you find yourself reaching for a verdict about, for example, a colleague or a stranger on the internet or a public figure whose name has just surfaced in a story of only half red or not red at all or a neighbor whose behavior is annoying you, pause long enough to notice what you're actually doing. Are you trying to find out what is owed to this individual and then give it to them or are you trying to find a target for something you were already feeling

12:51before this particular person came into view. The difference here is the difference between a just act and an unjust one, regardless of whether the person on the receiving end happens to deserve what you hand them. Getting the right outcome by accident is not justice. Justice is the discipline of looking carefully, the willingness to be slow in that looking and care and the honesty to admit when you do not yet have enough or know enough to act. It is a practice, of course, and like all practices, it can be trained or it can be neglected. And don't forget, the direction of progress or regression compounds. What is true of you, the individual, is true of the society of which you are apart, an individual who has lost their appetite for the patient work of finding out what is owed and who has replaced it with an appetite for visible punishment quickly delivered is eventually a society which has suffered the same fate. And such things will not stop at court

13:57rooms or in the comment sections. They will remake slowly and then suddenly the very texture of ordinary life between neighbors. And I think you can see that that is already happening. Every one of us individually is part of resolving or making worse this problem. So I want you to think really hard today about what part you are going to play and how you're going to plan. Thanks for listening.