One of the biggest problems I see most often in justice is people’s conflation of innocence with goodwill. That is they expect people to prove their innocence by shifting burden of proof onto the negative. People aren’t given the benefit of the doubt, but are treated as lower class citizens until they prove themselves.
Ironically, society gives guilty people the benefit of the doubt as if goodwilling people are obligated to assume the risk of others being manipulative and untrustworthy. It’s backwards, but society doesn’t care. Instead, society makes appeals to emotion, popularity, misery, and absurdity in saying those who can’t afford to assume the risk are too difficult to be bothered. The rule of law has been transformed into survival of the fittest power politics where it’s OK to blame the victim and people aren’t held responsible for their actions.
You see this especially towards whites and males who are expected to be rugged individualists to accommodate historical injustice. Pragmatism is wielded against them, and if they refuse to concede, they’re called egotistically arrogant and punished by authorities, even to the point of being labeled as needing to be psychologically professionalized, institutionalized, or medicated.
What is wrong with society? If I didn’t know any better, I would think we lived in the middle of Weimar Germany.
Can you realize that empiricism is elitism because people aren’t born with video cameras out of their eyes or microphones out of their ears?
Whether I can give a concrete example or not doesn’t matter. Those born without the ability to acquire, accumulate, record, and present evidence shouldn’t be victimized by criminals who can hide behind plausible deniability.
Furthermore, people shouldn’t be obligated to assume the risk of learning from experience, nor should they be forced into a vicious cycle of being traumatized from experience such that future record-keeping becomes disabled.
A concrete example does not have to be a film. All you have to do is be specific so that the abstract claims you are making are clear. It is not about proving your assertions, it is about clarifying them. IOW describe in words a specific example of what you are generalizing about. And since there are a few different scenarios, an example of each would be useful.
Well a clear example I can think of is procedural prejudice.
Say someone asks to participate in an activity you’re active in. You say “no” or perhaps don’t say anything at all, denying by default. This doesn’t mean you believe someone’s guilty. It just means you believe someone is not necessarily goodwilling, so you exercising your right of not being forced to assume the risk.
If someone’s popular enough, someone can harass you into arguing over someone really being untrustworthy, hiding behind freedom of speech.
You then accuse someone of harassment, but someone makes an appeal to pragmatism in saying you’ve made offer and acceptance impossible or that it’s not your right to restrict someone from speaking. Instead, you need to get professional mental help for not being able or willing to put up with someone in having your freedom of assembly and rights to privacy violated.
Later, this harassment can elevate to the point of someone damaging your physical property out of spite, but hiding behind plausible deniability. If you go to authorities, someone is given the benefit of the doubt. Someone might even claim provocation from your very existence, and if someone’s popular enough, nobody around will criticize someone by default.
On the other hand, if you go to become active in the public sphere where everyone is entitled to security, someone may become influential enough due to being noisy (as previously suggested from having a harassing character) and outcast you in expecting you to prove your character beyond the shadow of a doubt before being entitled to public activity.
This is especially the case in a feminist, multiculturalist society where someone can hide behind demographics in accusing you of being sexist or racist. Furthermore, the general public can become intimidated against criticizing them because it’s afraid of enduring sexist or racist accusations as well. Besides, it doesn’t want to be harassed either, so it could prefer the path of least resistance in simply ignoring your plight because you’re too difficult to be bothered.
All i was looking for was some kind of real-life scenario that epitomized what you where talking about. i wasn’t looking for empirical evidence to prove your claim, just an example.
I appreciate you responding to my, or our, request, but I think it needs to be even more concrete to be clear. Perhaps I would agree with you in this instance, perhaps I would not. It would depend on the activity itself and more context related specifics. It seems to me much of this has been possible through the whole history of the country and is not a recent phenomenon. Some specific facets of the harassment may be modern, or may not be, but this kind of thing, as far as I can tell at this level of abstraction, has been going on since before, even, there was an independent nation.
I see your point, but only vaguely. We have to assume something, cops don't assume anything by powers of arrest they just have probable cause. After that standard is met, innoscence is presumed for reasons other than assuming risk. Ideas of goodwill, feelings, politics etc, it seems to me, play into it, too but the risk of this, particularly of seeing an affinity between being charitable to take risks toward clinets accused who seem to offer politically beneficial packages toward those who assume such risks I think is overblown (and many would pause before taking it). Although there are elements of duplicity in the system, as you rightly point it out, I don't think its a systemic problem. The irony of this duplicity, has the sad consequence of the victimization of empirically disconnected persons, whose self image does contrary service to political expediency.
But anyone with a common sense even on the level of a public defender's nose, can overcome this bias, and bias, after all is more of a problem for uneven risk taking by goodwilled people , on the long run, then the short gains of expedience. Such risk-taking may convery.
Probablly couldn't agree with you, that this problem comes anywhere near any analogy with totalitarian regimes. Sorry.
