Bruno

Discussion (4) ¬

1. 
   Marco

   February 2, 2016 at 2:17 am | #

   Even if it did not make you many friends… It for sure earned you my respect!
   That’s how a responsible society should think and act!
2. 
   Pete Rogan

   February 2, 2016 at 9:15 pm | #

   Not many people consider that the larger question of justice evolved to remove the personal quality out of trials — whether by jury, combat, ordeal, or whatever. The larger sense of the polity, the people, being protected against acts of aggression and violence replaced the tribal and personal sense of injury and revenge. We still have this individual rights concept at law, especially for civil trials, moderated by the concept of equity, or a shared set of values that sometimes has a monetary value, sometimes something else. It may not be a perfect form of justice, but we are not perfect administrators of justice either. We continue to try to improve, though. How we do that is also subject to interpretation and difference of opinion, a subject I try to steer clear of with people with strong feelings about their personal responsibility to the concept of ‘justice,’ whether large or small. That way bruises lie.
3. 
   Jeffrey Nonken

   February 3, 2016 at 8:17 pm | #

   If it doesn’t work for everybody, it doesn’t work. If we can’t apply a fair system to people we hate, then the system can be abused for anybody.

   And next time you are accused, how can you be sure you are treated fairly? Sauce for the goose.

   That said, I don’t think our so-called justice system actually is fair; it’s got more problems than I can count. But we’re speaking to the ideals Bruno is expressing here.
4. 
   Edward Welbourne

   February 7, 2016 at 8:16 pm | #

   Bruno lists two of the four generally respected grounds for punishment (reasons for jailing someone): rehabilitation (fix the bad person) and restraint (protect the public from further bad actions); the other two are restitution (making those harmed whole again; Bruno addresses this earlier as infeasible around murder) and deterrence (discouraging others from contemplating similar crimes). Retribution and revenge are explicitly not recognised by civilised justice systems as legitimate. There’s a whole mountain of reasons for that.

   One of the (many) failings of revenge is that it’s far too easy for the baddie’s sympathisers to portray it as unjust (so deserving of counter-revenge – watch that spiral blossom) or to use the act of revenge to frame the original mass murder as part of a “just” war (that they’ll claim is about liberating their target audience from oppression). Worst of all is when they get to make a “martyr” of a mass murderer; that’s much harder to do when a trial has unequivocally shown him guilty of mass murder and a court has (boringly) sentenced him to the (boringly) usual punishment for that crime. When Breivik blew up the middle of Oslo, the justice system was careful to deal with him utterly even-handedly (i.e. boringly), so that any other white supremacist nut-jobs out there couldn’t make political capital out of his treatment.