Just some stuff I’ve been thinking about for my own records. It gets more inside baseball the further it goes, beware. The integrity to be a nobody One form of integrity we don’t talk about is the integrity to be a nobody. The kind of integrity you need to keep doing the right thing while aware that you’ll die unknown. The grit to go on when you know you’ll not touch your dreams. A necessary attribute given that if humans set their dreams in competitive terms -and they do- the vast majority of people cannot reach their wildest dreams. Not becoming bitter, not losing sight of the good that you can still do while honestly facing the reality that you’ve hit the limits of your success, there’s quiet integrity in that.
I think we always wrestle with the need to convict the guilty and punish the innocent, but I don't think "beyond reasonable doubt" really means 99% certainty, no reasonable person could disagree. That's certainly not how it's been interpreted in the past, and reasonable people can have some very wild opinions so that doesn't seem particularly practical.
Perhaps I'm too pessimistic, but I think the law will always be constrained by the fact that it needs to be a more appealing option than just settling the matter through private violence. When the state is weak or unwilling to intervene, you don't just get people reconciling peacefully, you get blood feuds, honor killings and lynch mobs. If the criticism of the justice system is that it's institutionalised revenge, then the counterpoint is that privatised revenge cares even less for due process and a fair trial.
I am a fan of restorative justice, like most people I love a good "former criminal turns his life around" storyline (in fiction or in real life) and it's depressing whenever justice systems don't have that as their primary aim. We just don't really know how to make a process of internal change and transformation scale, and I'd be far more interested if prison abolitionists took that question seriously rather than just dismissing it. Generally the assumption just seems to be that crime won't happen if we just raise quality of life enough, which is definitely not how people work.
I'll stand by moral realism, at the very least I think it's a useful to treat moral values as something that must be discovered rather than just invented. At the very least, I'm sure I could present an argument that would seem compelling to a slaveholder that slavery is wrong by appealing to existing moral intuitions, although that doesn't mean the slaveholder will necessarily agree. It just seems more productive to treat this as something we can disagree on while still pursuing a shared goal.
The penultimate point is probably why I like Utilitarian ethics so - it often gets described as cold and uncaring, but I think that putting the focus on the actual outcome rather than on the person doing/not doing the action is the best antidote for our naturally self-centered view of things.
I think we always wrestle with the need to convict the guilty and punish the innocent, but I don't think "beyond reasonable doubt" really means 99% certainty, no reasonable person could disagree. That's certainly not how it's been interpreted in the past, and reasonable people can have some very wild opinions so that doesn't seem particularly practical.
Perhaps I'm too pessimistic, but I think the law will always be constrained by the fact that it needs to be a more appealing option than just settling the matter through private violence. When the state is weak or unwilling to intervene, you don't just get people reconciling peacefully, you get blood feuds, honor killings and lynch mobs. If the criticism of the justice system is that it's institutionalised revenge, then the counterpoint is that privatised revenge cares even less for due process and a fair trial.
I am a fan of restorative justice, like most people I love a good "former criminal turns his life around" storyline (in fiction or in real life) and it's depressing whenever justice systems don't have that as their primary aim. We just don't really know how to make a process of internal change and transformation scale, and I'd be far more interested if prison abolitionists took that question seriously rather than just dismissing it. Generally the assumption just seems to be that crime won't happen if we just raise quality of life enough, which is definitely not how people work.
I'll stand by moral realism, at the very least I think it's a useful to treat moral values as something that must be discovered rather than just invented. At the very least, I'm sure I could present an argument that would seem compelling to a slaveholder that slavery is wrong by appealing to existing moral intuitions, although that doesn't mean the slaveholder will necessarily agree. It just seems more productive to treat this as something we can disagree on while still pursuing a shared goal.
The penultimate point is probably why I like Utilitarian ethics so - it often gets described as cold and uncaring, but I think that putting the focus on the actual outcome rather than on the person doing/not doing the action is the best antidote for our naturally self-centered view of things.