Just This

As I've noted before, I subscribe to the Mark Twain quote "Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first." I've also noted that I tend to extend this to people, in the sense that I understand that everyone I meet, not matter how old they are in relation to me, had a sense of themselves before they had any sense of me. And in that regard, they were "here first." And as such, they also owe me nothing. Society might institute rules to different effect, and people themselves may decide that they have some debt to me, but in the grand scheme of things, I hold that it I shouldn't go around saying that people owe me something. Other people owe me nothing. They were here first.

One day, I was reading the entry on Justice in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and came across the following: "In other words, if justice is to be identified with morality as such, it must be morality in the sense of ‘what we owe to each other’." And that raised an interesting question. If I understand that people do not intrinsically owe anything to each other, can I still believe in justice as anything other than a label that people apply to things? There's a part of me that's unsure that I do. I understand that I don't place any real stock in the idea of fairness as an objective concept. And if life isn't, and is not required to be, at all fair, does it make any more sense to believe that life is, or is required to be, at all just?

I will admit that I'm never sure that I've managed to avoid falling into a variation of David Hume's "Is-Ought Problem," in the sense that I understand that the world is not objectively just, and from there I have reasoned that there is no reason that it ought to be objectively just. By the same token, I also admit to never being certain that I'm progressing towards a sense of equanimity, as opposed to simple resignation. Be that as it may, however, I lack any sense of telos for the universe, or for humanity, independent of the goals and ends that people set for themselves. And thus, there is no greater point than people's own wants, needs and desires to judge their actions against. So a homicide is defined as a murder because it offends the sensibilities of whomever is empowered to make such decisions, whether judge or jury, and not because it goes against some cosmic plan that required the deceased remain alive.

The upshot of all of this, perhaps obviously, is that I am only a just person to the degree that other people find me so. And their determinations are fundamentally arbitrary, based on their personal understandings of the world around them. Ant determination that I might make as to whether I am just or not only matters to the degree that I can convince (or perhaps coerce) someone to behave as though it is true. I am owed a specific answer on that question to no greater degree than I am owed anything else. People have their own lives to lead, and how they choose to do so is not for me to say.

The realization that the world cannot be just leaves me with the understanding that all the world can be is to my liking. But if I am to make it so, then I must take ownership of things... and the consequences that come with them. Appeals to justice are often appeals to others. Either to make things "right" some way that one wishes them to be, or to look the other way when makes things right via a path that would otherwise invite sanction. If the world owes me nothing, and the people in it owe me nothing, than anything I want, I must make for myself, and if I cannot do that, I am better off letting it go.