AnthonyC comments on Less Wrong Rationality and Mainstream Philosophy - Less Wrong

106 Post author: lukeprog 20 March 2011 08:28PM

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Comment author: AnthonyC 29 April 2011 07:15:21PM 0 points [-]

Socrates definitely drew on some questionable intuitions in Plato's dialogues, but I think justice is a particularly slippery concept, in that it requires a prior conception of both the law and the good.

Legality is, for any sufficiently well-written laws, a purely factual matter. Does x break the law? Yes/no. Morality is, for any particular sufficiently well-written moral system, also a factual matter, but with more degrees of freedom. Is x good? Is x optimally good? Is x bad, but the best available option? Is the moral law, as written, itself good or optimally good under it's own definition of goodness?

Justice flings this all together in one pot: What ought the law to be? How ought the law to be enforced? How should we feel about the execution of justice?

This may be relatively clear to most readers of this site who grew up aware that good/evil and law/chaos are largely orthogonal, but in my experience many (most?) people have significant confusion/crossover between "illegal" and "immoral."