Unvermögen

Today we close the series on Justice and return to the question with which it began: Has Justice been Served? The series began with a list of words that kept growing as the investigation progressed.  We started with a list of 79  That became 212  By the end, the list had grown to roughly 450, and I am sure that several are missing. At that scale, the list no longer clarifies Justice by itself. Its value lies in revealing just how much conceptual machinery is compressed into one seemingly simple question:  Has Justice been Served? Across these eleven installments, we learned a few things. It all begins with a disturbance: The Act + The Actor + The Recipient An Actor commits an Act that affects a Recipient . Then, Judgement identifies and qualifies it. Outcome alters the world in response. Repair attempts to restore what was disturbed. But none of these guarantees that Justice will be  felt . An Outcome may be executed. Repair may be attempted. The file may be clo...

In this post (8/9), we turn to a subject I originally intended to skip: Outcome ; what comes after Judgement, and before Repair. I wanted to skip it for several reasons. First, the subject is a little morbid. Who wants to spend time discussing the chopping off of hands, enslavement, imprisonment, bodily punishment, and execution, all performed in the name of Justice? Second, I assumed that Judgement and Repair would already cover punishment, both directly and indirectly. A separate post on Outcome seemed likely to repeat things we had already discussed. Third, Outcome appeared to be the least conceptually interesting part of the Justice mechanism. Once the Event had been Judged, the rest seemed almost mechanical: determine the sentence and carry it out. Outcome looked more like an administrative step than a philosophical problem. But an Outcome contains another Judgement of its own. It decides what the Actor deserves, what the Institution is trying to protect, what kind of suffering th...