some thoughts about "modern" justice

as I have noted elsewhere, we do not have type of universal ethics/moral
theory that covers all…what we have today is situational ethics, the
situation dictates the ethics/morals…which is basically “ad hoc” ethics/morals

there are no facts I bring to bear that will allow us to justify any type of
universal ethical/moral theory…and the same is true of any type
of universal theory of justice… what is just? Socrates/Plato could never
answer this question because it required an acceptable universal theory of
justice… and we don’t have that…our theories of justice are also “ad hoc” theories,
born of the moment, to fit a specific situation… not to cover all situations of justice…

but Kropotkin, you can’t have a universal theory of justice… there are no facts which
can cover such a universal theory of justice… exactly… that is my point…

every single theory of justice has exceptions and exemptions… those exceptions
and exemptions prevent us from ever holding to a universal theory of justice…
what facts can I bring out that will allow us to ever agree to a universal theory
of justice? you may as well say, the earth is 93 million miles from the sun for
all the facts we can bring into this discussion of facts that will allow us to
create a universal theory of justice…

we can produce all kinds of pretend theories like, if human beings don’t have some
threat of punishment to force them into action, we will have chaos and anarchy…
that is an assumption based on … something but not base on facts… perhaps
that famous “gut instinct” will inform us of some facts about why we need punishment
to have a safe society…

so we have no universal/transcendental theory of ethics/moral and we don’t
have any sort of universal theory of justice and if you think about it, we don’t
have any universal theory of political or philosophical or cultural…

we are lacking all sorts of universal/transcendental theories which allow us
to hold universal theories of justice, morals, politics, philosophy, history, language,
psychology… we lack any type of universal/transcendental theories of reality…

we cannot agree as to what real, what is knowledge, what is ethics, what is aesthetics,

we can’t even agree to what is right or wrong because we have no universal theory
of right or wrong…so what exactly do we have?

a whole lot of "ad hoc’’ theories of the universe… theories of the moment, meant to
cover the situation at the time…nothing beyond the situation at hand, nothing like
a universal theory which can cover every instance of what we seek…
be it justice or ethics or morality or philosophical, or historical or social…

we simply lack any, ANY type of universal/transcendental theory to cover
what ails us, be it social, ethical, political, historical, philosophical, scientific,
aesthetical, or any type of human construct…disciplines as it were…

our entire life is made up of “ad hoc” theories meant to cover the moment,
nothing more… to deal with the situation at hand, nothing permanent…
just to deal with the here and now…

no wonder we feel adrift in the modern world… we have no universal theories
that attach us to the ground… we are nothing more then balloons floating
through the air with nothing to tie us to the ground…

hence we are alienated and disconnected… we have no universal theory to
fix us in our current lives… our entire modern existence is one that is “ad hoc”
of the moment…designed to deal with the current situation, nothing beyond that…
and so we must readjust our morals, values, philosophies, psychologies, and histories,
with every new situation because we have no universal/transcendental theories of,
well frankly, anything…

every situation requires new thinking because we have no set, universal theory to
fit or match that situation…

Kropotkin

I agree that the ways we seek (or even define) justice change based on circumstances – there is no universal road map, but there may be a set of principles
that doesn’t change all that much.

Can’t we agree that there’s a pretty persistent (if not fuzzy at the edges) agreement on the extremes of well-being and pain?

For examples of my stance on this, read the Moral Landscape by Sam Harris.

To bring this more into your wheelhouse, anarchist communism might not have been an effective way to achieve justice, i.e. its aim to reconcile the dissonance that exists between the concept of the individual and collective might indeed be a good intention, but maybe anarchist communism wasn’t the way to do it. And as you point out, things shift and change, and what didn’t work yesterday might work today.

I think a lot about how the “means of production” will change in coming years, creating a surplus to meet human needs (if not human ‘wants’ at their pathological extremes) and I think about bio-engineering, neurotech, deep learning, brain computer interfaces, renewables, automation, and I think, maybe at some point, given these new developments, not only does anarchist-communism work, but it may be REQUIRED if we are not to destroy ourselves.

The reflexive hatred I’ve witnessed for any well-reasoned concept that threatens to question econ 101 by way off untethering the concept of labor with the concept of production is enough to make me lament the inevitable demise of the human experiment. The social dominance orientation is ferociously strong in the human psyche and one would expect to see fanatics burn it all down before letting go of the “law” of supply and demand.

If brain computer interfaces are required not to mention neurotech then we are already destroyed, we’ve destroyed what it means to be human in lieu of becoming robots.

Having a brain to computer interface doesn’t make you a “robot.” What it might do is allow us to be more human.

If you use a smart phone, you already use a BCI, and streaming it thru a different input, as opposed to merely your eyes
or ears, is not somehow crossing a discreet line that makes you no longer human. It’s just something that might
take a bit of time getting your head around. :slight_smile:

All it does is change the input and the bandwidth. Maybe humans aren’t so good at quashing our base instincts
of fallacy, bias, reflexive behaviors based on falsities; these mistakes often result in damage to our wellbeing.

Keep in mind a BCI is smelted from elements mined from rock and woven together in ornate form to
perform a task. We see nature evolving in this way all the time. Look at a spider web. Look at how a mussel
occupies a shell formed from layers of sediment. In a very real sense, a BCI is made of earth-stuff,
like honeycomb, spiderweb, sea shells, or the rocks in bird’s gut that helps the digestion of food.
BCIs are just another stage in evolution.

What I’d like to preserve about humanity is not whether we have virginal brains locked in our skulls.
I’d like to foremost preserve the meta awareness of ourselves and the ability to make choices that foster wellbeing,
reduce suffering for sentient creatures, for its own sake.

Curiosity, the moral impulse, cooperation, wonder, empathy, justice, virtue, game theory, decision theory.
These are the human traits worth preserving and augmenting. When humans are acting at their best,
usually coincides with when humans are the most informed, their mental models are most resembling actual truth,
and they are feeling calm and unthreatened. BCI can help us achieve this.

To be a purest about “no BCIs” means you are failing to be a purest about nature, in an even more fundamental way.