Your decision making works as a value scale, morality not so much.There is a subset of actions you can take which are just. If you do not give a high weight in acting justly, you're a dangerous person.
If you do not give a high weight in acting justly, you're a dangerous person.
The reverse is probably more true. If I give a high weight to acting justly I'll grab the nearest Claymore, get some blue face paint and scream "You can take my life but you can not take my freedom!" If I don't value justice I'll suck up to the new power and grab my piece of the new pie. That's a role someone was bound to fill. I'll be irrelevant.
People who value justice highly are implicitly harder to intimidate. They're harder to shame into compliance. They are less willing to subbordinate their Just wrath to gains in social standing. Sure, they don't steal cookies, but they're dangerous.
Cass Sunstein, David Schkade, and Daniel Kahneman, in a 1999 paper named Do People Want Optimal Deterrence, write:
If we're after optimal deterrence, we should punish potentially harmful actions more if they're hard to detect, or else the expected disutility of the punishment is too small. But apparently this does not accord with people's sense of justice.
Does this mean we should change our sense of justice? And should we apply optimal deterrence theory to informal social rewards and punishments, such as by getting angrier at antisocial behaviors that we learned of by (what the wrongdoer thought was) a freak coincidence?