Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sun Jan 17, 2021 4:15 am
I'll start at the end, if I may.
RCSaunders wrote: ↑Sun Jan 17, 2021 2:10 am
Reality is neither just or unjust. Justice only pertains to human actions. A tornado has no moral value, positive or negative. The behavior of a man with a gun does.
Okay. I see your distinction, RC. You believe in what are called "human evils," or "human injustices," but not in what some people call "natural evils" or "natural injustices." In your explanation, it seems you feel what is "natural" is always justified...or more correctly, that whatever is a product of nature is not a fit subject to characterize as a moral issue. This seems confirmed by your statement,
I regard anything that interfere's with the natural consequences of one's choices and actions injustice, and the only thing I regard as interference is the behavior of another human being
You also write:
Giving someone the unearned is just as unjust as taking away the earned from those who have produced it.
I can see there are situations in which that's right. If one rewards laziness, foolishness, lack of imagination or a refusal to work, one is actually crippling the person you're rewarding. You're cultivating bad character and dependency in them, and you're teaching them that their own efforts and actions count for nothing. Fair enough.
What I'm less certain about is this:
Whatever the consequences of one's choices and actions are, as determined by the nature of reality, is justice; whether those consequences are the benefit of our right choices and actions or a loss due to our wrong choices and actions....In most cases, that interference is negative, standing in the way of another individual's good and benefit from his right choices, i.e. causing harm to another individual that would otherwise not occur, therefore, and injustice. Of course, in this day and age, the opposite kind of injustice is perhaps the most common, people being rewarded for their failures (wrong choices and actions) and others being forced to clean up after others failures (saving drug addicts).
It seems to me that if "nature" (or "natural consequences," let us say) were perfectly just in themselves, this would be right. The appropriate consequences would follow from good action, and the appropriate consequences would follow from bad action.
Our difference here, IC, is that you use the word, "just," as though it had some intrinsic meaning separate from consequences, or at least, natural consequences, and I regard natural consequences as what defines justice.
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sun Jan 17, 2021 4:15 am
But is this the way the world actually works? Is virtue inevitably rewarded and vice greeted with the due consequences of vice? I think it's a hard sell to convince anybody who's lived here long that that's how it is. Sometimes the consequences we get are not what we deserve, but either byproducts of something we never intended, or even directly opposite to what we would expect for our actions. To put it simply, the wicked thrive and the righteous get pushed into the gutter...at least, that happens as often as the consequences fit the choices made.
Yes, that's the way the world actually works, but almost nobody likes it. It's much easier to blame all the, "bad," things that one experiences on an, "unjust, unfair," world, then to take responsibility for all one's choices and actions.
Life is hard and requires one to use all their abilities all the time to be and achieve all they can, to learn all they can, to develop every ability and skill they can, to work and produce all they can of value that their life requires, physically and psychologically. But there are no guarantees, except the guarantee that doing less than one's best means certain failure.
This is what I meant when I wrote: "Reality does not care why you did a wrong thing, ignorance, defiance, laziness, or yielding to some irrational impusle, the consequences (justice) are the same." By, "wrong," thing, I mean any choice or action made in contradiction of the nature of reality itself, of the laws of physics and the biological and psychological requirements of one's own nature. To defy any law of physics (like gravity or fire), to fail to nourish one's self properly (or to poison one's self), to not use and develop one's body, to not learn all one possibly can, to not think as well as one can about every choice, and to not work to produce all one can are all, "wrong," things; and to do anything that prevents one from being able to do those things is a, "wrong," thing.
Perhaps the most common, "wrong," thing most people do is to make their choices based on the belief that they have a right to a good life and when they discover life is difficult and problematic and that everything requires effort and often discomfort, they feel life is, "unjust," and their failure and suffering is not their fault--but it is always their fault.
Does anyone ever suffer anything that is it not their fault? Of course. We all do. They are not injustices, they are simply facts we must learn to deal with, if possible, and overcome, not excuses for more failure, which is how most people deal with them.
Life is tough. It is the means and potential to all good things and achievement, but it all has to be won by one's constant effort. Those of us who know what life is, what its potential is, regard no difficulty or hardship to high a price for the joy of a life of success, achievement and happiness, and that anything less is not a life worth living.
No one has to live that way, but they deserve what they get, and, however bad or cruel it seems, it is justice. Most of mankind refuses to live as their nature's require and go through life, blaming a cruel and unjust world for all their problems which are ultimately of their own making.
Well, now you know it.