I'm the son of a corrections officer, so my notion of "justice" may be skewed down a hard-nose line when looking at criminality. I realize now, looking over my post in the other thread on the topic, that my explanation of justice was a bit too broad. When something is done for the greater good of humanity, it is a just action. That was my basic stance, but now I see that just actions and justice have very little to do with each other. All of us commit just acts when we pick up a piece of litter off of the streets of our neighborhoods, but the word justice is only thrown in when the original perpetrator is fined for throwing the trash on the ground in the first place. That's not to say that the two of them don't go together. Surely putting someone in prison for 30 years for littering is not a just act, nor does it serve justice.
Generally speaking, justice requires justness. With my background, I tend to think of justice whenever someone has committed an illegal, unethical or immoral act and deserves some sort of punishment for it.
I'll go into nerd-mode here for a second and use the manga/anime Death Note as an example. For those of you just tuning in, Death Note is basically the story of a bored student genius named Light Yagami who is outraged at the world around him and how perverse and violent it is. One day he finds a magical notebook on the ground, later revealed to have been dropped by a Shinigami, which says that if he writes someone's name in it, they will die(there are various other rules around it, but it's not important). The rest of the story involves his gradual decline into madness while he's wielding the power of the Death Note, calling himself "Justice," and even going so far as to proclaim himself "God of [his] New World."
The story's always interested me for it moral and ethical message(or lack thereof).
One of the questions posed was "Is it right/just to kill bad people?" Surely we can agree that the world would be a much better place if every murderer, serial killer, kidnapper, rapist, child molester, etc. suddenly all died of heart attacks. At the same time, killing someone in cold blood is equally as immoral. So, was Light Yagami's quest to become "God of the New World" really justice?
I, myself, would say no. He started out with honorable intentions, using the term lightly, but near the end he basically became a homicidal maniac, filled with much more sin than any of the people he killed.
To further elaborate, if I possessed a Death Note, not many people would disagree with me killing off people like Osama bin Laden or your friendly neighborhood child molester. However, if I were to start using it to kill off other people I find disagreeable, say Michael Moore or Little Timmy that picked on me in the fifth grade, this certainly wouldn't be a just act or justice.
I'm afraid my attempt to elaborate threw me off track here, so let me get back on.
Justice to me, means more about punishing bad guys than doing good. Just action means more about promoting or engaging in good behavior that benefits mankind. I'll try explaining better a bit later, but right now I'm strapped for time.
