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Buddhist View of Justice
kayte
Veteran
I'm curious of how Buddhists view justice or if they are concerned with it. I've observed that people either practice it as a high ideal or use it for revenge. I think that it can be abused if approached from a strong emotional POV, but a justice system is necessary. What are your thoughts?
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"All tremble at the rod. All fear death. Comparing others with oneself, one should neither strike nor cause to strike.
All tremble at the rod. Life is dear to all. Comparing others with oneself, one should neither strike nor cause to strike.
Whoever tries to seek happiness through hurting others, cannot find happiness.
Whoever tries to seek happiness without hurting others, can find happiness.
Speak not harshly to anyone. Those thus addressed will retort. Painful, indeed, is vindictive speech. Blows in exchange may bruise you.
If, like a cracked gong, you silence yourself, you have already attained Nibbana: no vindictiveness will be found in you.
As with a staff the heardsman drives his cattle to pasture, even so do old age and death drive out the lives of beings.
So, when a fool does wrong deeds, he does not realize (their evil nature); by his own deeds the stupid man is tormented, like one burnt by fire.
Whosoever causes pain to the innocent ones will himself suffer quickly from one of the following ten states.
He will get sharp pain or injury of the body, or get serious illness or become mad.
Or punishment by the kind, or being accused of doing wrong or death of relatives or loss of treasures.
Or his house will be struck by lightning or after death, he will be reborn in Hell."
This is pretty much my own personal view of justice. You describe a cause and effect situation if people seek revenge. I believe that negative thoughts, like revenge, can warp a person's reason and possibly even their mind.
I've observed an increase in hubris in people. Hubris was a crime in ancient Athens. It seems to be encouraged in society today. This probably affects the justice system and causes people to abuse it.
I saw a group of women turn on one of their own because she took credit for another person's work. She didn't actually steal it, she copied it and used it as an example of her work. I didn't see how the situation started but it was disturbing to see the degree of anger from people who were not directly involved. One or two people pointed out that the woman was having personal problems and asked the others to hold off on accusing her. Others wanted to punish her to the max. Finally, the supervisor had to put an end to it. Those women were like a mob. Some of the most emotional ones were not the damaged party. Funny thing was, the person who had their work copied was the most gracious.
I don't mean to complicate the question, but here goes. I've come to the conclusion that people who cultivate anger in their actions, come to practice it much like other people practice the 4 Noble Truths,etc. They seem to try and legitimize anger and revenge by claiming it to be righteous justice. In this way they convince others, who might be more compassionate, to follow along. They also corrupt real justice, which should be about constructive repair of a wrong. Who becomes most responsible for the negative effects? The person who inspires the righteous justice or the ones who follow along?
Cultivating the 4NTs is a constructive practice, whereas letting anger take control is, of course, pretty destructive. In your example, "Righteous Justice" ™ is letting anger and passion make oneself feel like they are the absolute moral superior which, of course, leads to them being very prideful and vindictive. As you said, any true form of justice should be constructive.
I feel that I sometimes have a knee-jerk reaction to comments made about sensitive subjects. This incident brought it to my attention. I would loath to "mob" someone the way they did in the above scenario, but I am guilty of being overly sensitive. I don't meditate the way Buddhism instructs, but I do find many lessons in observing. I get the hints, when they come.
I am not a Buddhist, as in I've yet to commit to the Dharma, but few things upset me as much as the way society, generally reacts to the suffering of those who they deem deserve it. I often encounter footage of people, sometimes teenagers given life sentences, breaking down in tears and the most average people I walk past the street are cheering and celebrating. Now more and more states are loud about extending the death penalty for this and that and I can tell, after all the damage they do, people still yearn for more, like live tv entertainment executions. It is rather traumatic for me and such intense hatred often makes me lose my will to live.
A life behind bars is wasted. A life taken is wasted. Any family that person had is broken, torn apart. Any family they could've had is lost. If I die because of someone else's fault, how could such devastation honor my memory? They shouldn't remain a danger to others, of course, they should be properly rehabilitated, but I recognize no justice in making people suffer. If they come to regret what they did, they should be able to try and make up for it in some way. And if they don't come to regret it the justice system fails a purpose that is core to its existence as far as I'm concerned.
RobinH I think you make a very good point. Most people’s sense of outrage is more developed than their actual sense of justice, and that outrage spills over into anger and violent retribution. It is well known that people individually can be kind, sensitive, good-hearted, but as a mob can be much more volatile.
I think it’s very interesting with all the information coming to light from the Epstein files, that there has been a lot of outrage but very little actual consequence. It seems that in the structure of society today it is a lot more difficult for action to manifest than in the past. Reputational damage is about as far as it seems to go — I don’t think Deepak Chopra will be selling as many books.
It's a shame wealth and power shields people from consequence, because it only adds to this blind outrage, yet it fails to be constructive. I believe Epstein himself ended up on the registry a while back, yet it didn't stop him from building a network of abuse further. While others like that sometimes got murdered by their neighbours (hailed as heroes), he was still shaking hands with the elite and doing his operations from his private resorts. People are rightfully upset, that politicians and authorities choose to make exceptions when it comes to the privileged, but then again, people think they can take everything that's wrong with these things and pack it into the word "pedophile" (a clinical term) while refuse to acknowledge that the reason for abuse, any kind of abuse is much more universal: ignorance. Ignorance of privacy, of bodily integrity, of boundaries, of agency, of healthy developmental needs. Anyone who learns to avoid these and how to: can be kind to others and anyone who fails to avoid these can do great harm, even if they believe their motivations are pure as snow and they have the support of society behind them.
Yes, it reminds me of a blog I came across about the cultural abuse of young boys in Afghanistan, apparently there it’s very normal for adult men to sodomise young boys to relieve their bodily needs. It’s no wonder that that country is in so much trouble, the amount of trauma stored up must be considerable.
I don't know about such. I know genital mutilation can be culturally / religiously motivated and I can imagine sexual abuse being more rampant in some cultural circumstances, but never heard of the specific example, nor seen any data about it. I have very specific ideas about all the factors that come into play from the nurture side of the story when people engage in abusive behavior like such. I can point fingers to society all day long and write several pages on how all our monsters are just products of their environment and I guarantee that even if some of you are hell-bent on seeing this issue in black and white, it'd all make sense. But at the end of the day, there is agency, there is personal responsibility and everyone is very much responsible for their own behavior. There is a collective fault for pushing people to the edge, after all, we are all conditioned to be pleasure-oriented, from a young age to measure one's worth in success in romantic relationships and libido among other things. But choices are still made and those choices have consequences.
I am writing and publishing rather tabooless piece of crime-mystery fiction about all kinds of sexual deviants with the anti-hero protagonist being a voyeur, who intrudes on people's privacy all the time for his own satisfaction and he can masterfully rationalize all it by saying he's no different from everyone else, just more honest about it. And there's a lot of truth in that, especially in this day and age. But the point is that others use similar justifications to do even greater harm and he needs therapy to face his own problems he keeps ignoring to be able to rise above these things. It's a work-in-progress in terms of plot development, but I figured it's pointless to talk about justice and moralize if no one acknowledges any nuances, because some subjects are too uncomfortable so I'm trying to write a psychological study of various conditions into a cheap giallo.
The opportunity to be just or a blight is open to some of us.
Ahimsa is open to some of us.
To the best of our ability we (I hope) choose as much as we can or understand that is beneficial to ourselves and those around us.
I knew I had a plan...
At a Dharma talk many moons ago the Dharma teacher made this interesting point:
If people truly understood that their actions inevitably bring consequences "for every action there is a reaction", those of sound mind would act responsibly, not out of fear of punishment but out of wisdom. A society guided by this awareness might have little need for police, armies, or courts. Ethical behaviour would come from inner awareness rather than external enforcement.
However because human beings are still imperfect and often unaware, social structures like laws and institutions remain necessary.
Understanding karma can be seen as a path toward a more peaceful society.
A peaceful journey of 1000 kilometers begins with the first wholesome karmic step.
Of course you realise that by writing it in this way you are turning your readers into voyeurs as well. It depends on how tastefully it is done, it could be literary or cheap.
It's a comic, it's cheap in the sense that it aims to portray a pleasure-oriented mindset in relatable ways and it's not afraid to go down in the mud and get dirty. It's using entertaining qualities to lure the reader in for the deeper content as it aims to be about how the sexual fantasies and behaviors people develop often have roots in trauma or are otherwise coping mechanisms that the more one understands about the more they can do to become independent from their harmful effects. If you look at entertainment, with every novel equating psychopathy with serial killings, how shows like Dexter or Criminal Minds are so popular, while they're all about people losing control and leaving pain and destruction behind. I think as a society we're way too convinced that if someone is dealt bad cards, they're powerless against such, which is crazy, because the only thing that stands between them and their victims most of the time is the sense and realization that they have a choice and they can choose otherwise. So I'd like to see more stories out there about that: characters working through their issues to live a healthier life, finding a way from a dark place that affects them and others in bad ways to a better place where they recognize the importance of things such as privacy or boundaries. This struggle-redemption story is normally represented in addictions, but most things sexual are way too taboo for people to try and understand. It'll definitely not be my most "Buddhist" work, just like the dramedy about demons and motherhood wasn't, but I also don't understand enough about Buddhism to write about it seriously (and people are probably less guarded against psychological fiction than against religious fiction), so I can only hope it'll be useful to some regardless.
Anyway, I feel like I keep hijacking a perfectly good topic, apologies. I said my piece about justice and I think I can also agree with Shoshin1's quoted Dharma teacher.
It definitely has some Buddhist aspects and would be worthy of a topic in its own right. Sometimes people who are addicted to pleasure turn to religion as a way of solving their problems, it might be an interesting counterpoint in your story.