The purpose of justice in a culture is to provide a safe environment to allow that roles fulfill their objectives within an institutionalized environment. In other words, the purpose of justice is to foster and inhibit the dysfunctional activities of institutionalized environments.
Justice can either work as the catalyst or as the entropy inhibitor of social behavior. Justice only exists as an external entity in a community and ensures the functionality of those institutions that allow the society to work as a system.
The concept of Justice does not refer to the judicial system of a culture. It includes all the individual, social and institutional actions that are developed to sustain the functionality of the system.
Justice is naturally driven by “common sense” which implicitly includes the values of the cultural archetype, the life-style and the moral of a culture. Justice works as a rigid framework that defines what is functional or dysfunctional in an environment.
Justice has two different roles that need to be integrated in order to sustain institutionalization: justice as a catalyst and justice as an inhibitor.
On the one hand, there is a catalyzing justice that has the responsibility of fostering the equality of opportunities that allow expanding the boundaries without endangering the institutionalization.
But, on the other hand justice has the role of inhibiting dysfunctional actions, which drives towards ensuring equal rights to all the members of a community. This avoids the entropy in institutions and establishes the framework to develop minimum strategies.
The Ontogenetic Map of Justice
The purpose of justice is to foster the existence of transcendent roles in a society in order to make institutionalization possible and avoid its corruption. An institution becomes corrupt when it needs to degrade the environment in order to profit from it.
Institutions are driven by transcendent goals. Therefore, the driver of justice is to confirm the achievement of the transcendent goals of a culture. These transcendent goals are included in the Constitution of a country.
This process is materialized when justice provides the framework to sustain the functionality of the country as a system. However, this is only possible if both the individual roles of the entities and the individuals of the culture are protected.
When the legal framework and the social and judicial system have solved these aspects, it becomes possible to deal with the active function of justice to provide equal opportunities for all.
The final purpose of justice is the fulfillment of the transcendent roles of a society and ensuring the functionality of society as a system. This is only possible if the individual roles have been assumed in order to make the institutionalization real.
It has to be considered that the judicial system of a society only punishes those aspects the society considers punishable.
The Maximal Strategy
The maximal strategy is given by the catalyzing justice of a culture that needs to provide equal opportunities for the members of a community.
Equal opportunities require the existence of a democratic environment that fosters cooperation. That is why justice is an essential part of democracy and democracy is the necessary environment for justice.
When the intention of ensuring equal opportunities has been confirmed, it becomes necessary to accept that there has to be a social repair to respond to the deviations produced by injustices in the real world. Therefore, social repairs need to be sustained by the judicial system in order to make them functional.
Equal opportunities become possible if they include the social repair for the dysfunctional actions that hindered the possibility of an individual or group to access such opportunities. Social repair needs to recognize the opportunities lost and not only the costs that were produced.
When social repair exists, it becomes possible to confirm the existence of social sanctions that sustain the equal opportunities. This implies that the society punishes those who limit others to achieve goals.
The catalyzing justice requires the existence of social sanctions for all those behaviors that endanger equal opportunities. These social sanctions sustain equal opportunities and are the catalyst for the existence of justice. In democratic environments legal justice does not sanction what is not sanctioned by society.
The Minimum Strategy
The equality of rights, as the purpose of the minimum strategy, needs to achieved in order to sustain the institutionalization of a society. This requires individual repair for all the dysfunctional actions an entity has suffered.
The individual repair has to fit into the limits of acceptance of a society. If it is below, it has no effect as a dissuasive object, but if it is above, it generates a “judicial profitable business” that produces paradoxical results in the judicial system.
The legal sanction is the entropy inhibitor of justice. Legal sanctions imply that they need to be in accordance with the dysfunctional behavior and its consequences. Legal sanctions are a way to punish actions and to dissuade their repetition.
The legal framework and its application establish the entropy inhibitor that avoids the corruption of the institutionalization of a culture. The entropy inhibitor is the basic price to be paid to ensure the functionality of justice.
The Types and Levels of Justice
We have synthesized the different levels of justice in four segments. These segments are:
- Defensive Justice
- Protective Justice
- Social Justice
- Adaptive Justice
Level 1) Defensive Justice
The first level of justice is the defensive justice that allows providing individual repair through the different alternatives the judicial system provides. This justice provides every member of the community with a defensive system to sustain the right the individual has according to the legal framework of the community. Defensive justice seeks individual repair in order to ensure that individuals have the right to recover part of the damages produced by someone’s dysfunctional behavior. Defensive justice allows individual to recover from unfair damages produced by third parties.
Level 2) Protective Justice
It includes level 1. The second level is the protective justice, which provides a framework that allows protecting individuals and entities from the dangers of the environment. Protective justice implies a legal framework to protect from direct actions or the collateral side effects of actions. Protective justice is simple to install when providing support for unprotected people, like children, but needs to include all the participants of a community in order to provide a safe environment to live in. It is based on providing protections for individuals to prevent the existence of dysfunctional behaviors. Protective justice is natural in the field of crimes but difficult to apply in civil and commercial affairs.
Level 3) Social Justice
It includes level 2. The third level implies the existence of social justice to exclude socially all the members who behave beyond the rules of a community. This justice exceeds the limits of the legal framework and deal with the acceptance of the social rules to limit the actions of individuals. Social justice implies both the existence of social sanctions and social repair to equilibrate the actions and ensure social institutionalization.
Social justice implies the existence of a social sanction produced by dysfunctional behaviors that have social consequences. It implies that the private damage is considered in terms of its social consequences in order to dissuade its repetition. Social justice implies considering the greater good when dealing with dysfunctional behaviors.
Level 4) Adaptive Justice
It includes level 3. The fourth level implies the existence of a justice that is able to interpret the spirit of laws and the spirit of a society in order to provide equal opportunities for all including the equality of rights. Adaptive justice is the justice that allows institutions to evolve towards a superior level by accepting and fostering behaviors that are beyond the standards of a culture but foster the expansion of the community. Adaptive justice implies paying the prices of individual felonies considering the greater good and the consequences in the environment. Adaptive justice implies considering the field of individual actions as part of social dysfunctional actions in order to find the better way to manage justice.
Peter Belohlavek
NOTE: The Unicist Research Institute was the pioneer in using the unicist logical approach in complexity science research and became a private global decentralized leading research organization in the field of human adaptive systems. It has an academic arm and a business arm.
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