Justice & Mercy

 A friend asked me “Why Just Learning Systems?  Do you mean that you work with only learning systems?  Just learning systems?  What does the “just” in just learning systems mean?”  

What a great question.  The answer can be short, or it can be more lengthy, developmental, evolving over time.  I’ll start with the short, immediate answer in this essay.  The title, Just Learning Systems, arises from an awareness that to create the systems we need we will have to reflect on and learn about justice, together.  The systems we need will be just systems.  That’s a short answer, a simple answer, but what does it mean?

Well, I’m not an expert on justice.  Let’s start with that admission.  Then let’s move on to a source of justice-related expertise, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy to see if we can borrow from and build on expert thinkers.  From the Stanford Encyclopedia we learn that: “justice takes on different meanings in different practical contexts, and to understand it fully we have to grapple with this diversity.”

To begin the grappling exercise the authors cite a 6th century AD definition of justice from the Institutes of Justinian that serves as a stable foundation for definitions of justice to this day: “the constant and perpetual will to render to each his due.” Essentially the term justice in this ancient definition, according to the authors, refers to reasoning about how individuals should be treated and what opportunities and resources they should have.  

The authors then identify several contrasts of justice definitions that have emerged in philosophical explorations since the 6th century.

Conservative vs Ideal Justice – a contrast between preserving the principles of justice that are already enacted on the one hand or transforming those principles and related norms to achieve a better definition of justice on the other hand.

Corrective vs Distributive Justice – a contrast between ensuring that no one interferes with another’s right to own/have/hold on the one hand or ensuring that all individuals have just opportunity to own/have/hold on the other hand.

Procedural vs Substantive Justice – a contrast between focus on the procedures used to determine who gets and does what on the one hand or an assessment of the actual resulting distribution of who gets and does what on the other hand.

Comparative vs Non-Comparative Justice – a contrast between defining what is just based on an understanding of the claims of multiple related parties on the one hand or understanding what is just based on a single individual’s claim to what s/he is due on the other hand. 

The authors of this encyclopedia entry conclude: “we will need to accept that no comprehensive theory of justice is available to us; we will have to make do with partial theories – theories about what justice requires in particular domains of human life……. We can get a better grasp of what justice means to us by seeing the various conceptions that compete for our attention as tied to aspects of our social world that did not exist in the past and are equally liable to disappear in the future.”

After reading the above I wondered how much of the work of justice can be argued rationally and how much must be truly felt, communicated, and co-created with people who share an interest, a space, a passion.  When we think about systems change, systems transformation, we will need to think about justice – what it means for us in our context of competing priorities, in our current social world.  

Perhaps because the encyclopedia entry referenced work by Gauthier, or perhaps because I wanted to shift my brain focus from rational arguments to the ocean of feelings conjured by a word like justice, I did a quick search on Mary Gauthier to find this precious reasoning on what is needed now.