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Will_Sawin comments on Logical Pinpointing - Less Wrong
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The statement that the world is just is a lie. There exist possible worlds that are just - for instance, these worlds would not have children kidnapped and forced to kill - and ours is not one of them.
Thus, justice is a meaningful concept. Justice is a concept defined in terms of the world (pinned-down causal links) and also irreducibly normative statements. Normative statements do not refer to "the world". They are useful because we can logically deduce imperatives from them. "If X is just, then do X." is correct, that is:
Do the right thing.
I am not entirely sure how you arrived at the conclusion that justice is a meaningful concept. I am also unclear on how you know the statement "If X is just, then do X" is correct. Could you elaborate further?
In general, I don't think it is a sufficient test for the meaningfulness of a property to say "I can imagine a universe which has/lacks this property, unlike our universe, therefore it is meaningful."
I did not intend to explain how i arrived at this conclusion. I'm just stating my answer to the question.
Do you think the statement "If X is just, then do X" is wrong?
Like army1987 notes, it is an instruction and not a statement. Considering that, I think "if X is just, then do X" is a good imperative to live by, assuming some good definition of justice. I don't think I would describe it as "wrong" or "correct" at this point.
OK. Exactly what you call it is unimportant.
What matters is that it gives justice meaning.
It may be incomplete. Do you have a place for Mercy?
The reason I'm not making distinctions among different moral words, though such distinctions exist in language, is that it seems the only new problem created by these moral words is understanding morality. Once you understand right and wrong, just and unjust can be defined just like you define regular words, even if something can be just but immoral.
That's an instruction, not a statement.
Um, mathematics.
I can't imagine a universe without mathematics, yet I think mathematics is meaningful. Doesn't this mean the test is not sufficient to determine the meaningfulness of a property?
Is there some established thinking on alternate universes without mathematics? My failure to imagine such universes is hardly conclusive.
Sorry, misread what you wrote in the grand parent. I agree with you.