Whether or not you acknowledge that
something is just depends upon your expectations and your perceived fulfillment
of what you think should be. If you have
no concept of what should be then you cannot determine whether or not something
is just. Justice can only be determined
after the fact, by someone or a group of people who have an intimate knowledge
of what is being judged. You can attempt
to arrange conditions where justice may prevail but until your expectations have
had an opportunity to be fulfilled the extent to which you were able to
vouchsafe justice cannot be determined.
Justice
is the belief that an act or set of actions have happened as they should have or
a physical thing is as it should be. If
you believe that an object fulfills its function then as far as you are concerned,
it is a just object and it does justice to the group it belongs to. If you believe that what has happened is what
should have happened then, as far as you are concerned, the action is just and
justice has been done.
Unless
you believe in an afterlife with differentiated outcomes, dependent upon
history, that are adjudicated after death by an absolute power that was here
before time, will exist throughout time and will continue after time stops,
unchanged and unchanging, knowing all that was, is and will be, then there can
be no absolute justice, no final justice, no justice for you that prevails
after you die.
As
we live our lives there is no justice but that which we define. You may be lucky enough to live in a family
or group that you consider just. But you
cannot live in a just world; justice is personal and pliable, temporal and
local. The best you can hope for is to
be a just person in your own eyes and to surround yourself with people who
generally agree with you on what justice is.
