We Must Say No To Thirsty Justice

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In this episode I work through how Stoic Justice differs from what we moderns typically mean by the word — because when we say "justice" today, we almost always mean retribution: rewards for the deserving, punishments for the rest. Stoic Justice isn't concerned with desert in that sense at all. It's concerned with giving each person what is owed to them as a fellow member of the Cosmopolis, and failing to do that is, on Stoic terms, about as serious a moral error as you can commit.

Along the way I push back on the fairly common claim that Justice is the "highest" of the cardinal virtues — the one that orients all the others and without which courage collapses into bravado, temperance into private self-management, and wisdom into mere cleverness. I grant the intuition has some force, but antakolouthia — the mutual entailment of the virtues — rules out any hierarchy, and I note that Marcus, contrary to what some popular communicators like to imply, isn't in the camp that elevates Justice above the rest.

From there I trace how our thirst for a culprit is eating away at social cohesion in the West. The older western instinct — that it is worse to wrongly convict the innocent than to let the guilty slip through — is being quietly replaced by something uglier: not "did this person do the thing?" but "is this person close enough to the thing that punishing them will feel like justice?" We're no longer just eager to punish the accused; we're hungry to produce more accused, and the bar for what counts as worthy of condemnation keeps dropping. Evidence stops being something to weigh and becomes something to enlist.

I argue this is injustice in the precise Stoic sense — not the cartoon sense of wanting to hurt someone, but a failure of attention. You cannot give each person their due if you will not first do the patient work of finding out what is due. And I close with what I want listeners to actually do: the next time they feel themselves reaching for a verdict, pause long enough to ask honestly whether they're trying to find out what's owed, or whether they're just trying to locate a target for something they were already feeling before this particular person walked into view. Getting the right outcome by accident isn't justice — justice is the discipline itself, and what's true of the individual eventually becomes true of the society they're part of.

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