Quotes About Justice

The Moralization Gap consists of complementary bargaining tactics in the negotiation for recompense between a victim and a perpetrator.

Ending extreme poverty for all people everywhere! May I live to see the day. (Not even Jesus was that optimistic: he told a supplicant, "The poor you will always have with you.")

A quantitative mindset, despite its nerdy aura, is in fact the morally enlightened one, because it treats every human life as having equal value rather than privileging the people who are closest to us or most photogenic. And it holds out the hope that we might identify the causes of suffering and thereby know which measures are most likely to reduce it.

These upheavals were driven by the impression that African Americans are at serious risk of being killed by the police. Yet as with terrorism and school shootings, the numbers are surprising. A total of 65 unarmed Americans of all races are killed by the police in an average year, of which 23 are African American, which is around three tenths of one percent of the 7,500 African American homicide victims.

one, because it treats every human life as having equal value rather than privileging the people who are closest to us or most photogenic.

Most homicides, Black notes, are really instances of capital punishment, with a private citizen as the judge, jury, and executioner.

Any candidate who suggests that too many people are going to jail for too long will be targeted in an opponent's television ads as "soft on crime" and booted out of office. The result is that the United States imprisons far more people than it should, with disproportionate harm falling on African American communities who have been stripped of large numbers of men. A

Intellectual liberalism was at the forefront of many forms of progress that almost everyone has come to accept, such as democracy, social insurance, religious tolerance, the abolition of slavery and judicial torture, the decline of war, and the expansion of human and civil rights.56 In many ways we are (almost) all liberals now.

Steven Alm, a judge who devised a "probation with enforcement" program, summed up the reason for the program's success: "When the system isn't consistent and predictable, when people are punished randomly, they think, My probation officer doesn't like me, or, Someone's prejudiced against me, rather than seeing that everyone who breaks a rule is treated equally, in precisely the same way.

Violent crime is a solvable problem.

The goal of the judicial system should be to rehabilitate wrongdoers rather than harming them

Charles Napier, the British army's commander in chief in India, faced with local complaints about the abolition of suttee, replied, "You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours."14

When England introduced drop hanging in 1783 and France introduced the guillotine in 1792, it was a moral advance, because an execution that instantly renders the victim unconscious is more humane than one that is designed to prolong his suffering.

to re-enter the roundtable of morality. As the psychologist Peter DeScioli points out, when you face an adversary alone, your best weapon may be an ax, but when you face an adversary in front of a throng of bystanders, your best weapon may be an argument.

between the time of Jesus and the 20th century, 19 million people were executed for trivial offenses.68

The moral arguments against war are irrefutable. As the musician Edwin Starr put it, "War. Hunh! What is it good for? Absolutely nothing.

The world has far too much morality. If you added up all the homicides committed in pursuit of self-help justice, the casualties of religious and revolutionary wars, the people executed for victimless crimes and misdemeanors, and the targets of ideological genocides, they would surely outnumber the fatalities from amoral predation and conquest.

legítimas, rápidas, justas, moderados y humanas diferencian sus consejos de la retórica de la mano dura contra la delincuencia preferida por los políticos de derechas.

Also, a state without an effective police and judiciary had to make a little punishment go a long way.

The first piece of wisdom they offer is that misfortune may be no one's fault.

The top five countries that still execute people in significant numbers form an unlikely club: China and Iran (more than a thousand apiece annually), Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United States. As in other areas of human flourishing (such as crime, war, health, longevity, accidents, and education), the United States is a laggard among wealthy democracies.

One [dogma] is that violence is caused by a deficit of morality and justice. On the contrary, violence is often caused by a surfeit of morality and justice, at least as they are conceived in the minds of the perpetrators.

If my starting offer is "I get to rob, beat, enslave, and kill you and your kind, but you don't get to rob, beat, enslave, or kill me or my kind," I can't expect you to agree to the deal or third parties to ratify it, because there's no good reason that I should get privileges just because I'm me and you're not.

Many hours of law-school argumentation have been spent on what to do with a man who stabs a corpse thinking it is his sleeping enemy, or whether it makes sense to charge a shooter with attempted murder if the nearest hospital is five minutes away and his victim survives, but to charge him with murder if the nearest hospital is fifteen minutes away and the victim succumbs.