Primal Justice

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This is an attempt to look at justice and government in a primitive way.

Suppose we are in a state of stone-age savagery, and I take your favorite rock? What are you going to do? My guess is that you will hit me with your second-favorite rock and take back your favorite, or at least that you will try to, or want to, do that. This corresponds to primitive feelings in many people. I think that the behavior described is basically good, and that the feelings evolved to support the behavior.

The primal behavior, as described, is to hurt the thief and reclaim the property. This serves two purposes. First, reclaiming the rock restores your property. Second, the hitting and the retaking provide a deterrent effect. If you merely reclaimed your rock, what would discourage me from trying to take it until I succeeded? Similarly, if your action was simply to hit me, I might value the rock more than a piece of my skull.

Therefore, people who react in this way have a better chance of not being stolen from, and presumably this reaction is therefore favored by evolution.

Now consider a more malicious act. Suppose I hit you, with or without taking anything. You can hit me back, but you can't take back any of my earlier actions. Hitting, therefore, requires more retaliation for a deterrent effect, since it's not possible to be unhit in the same way it is possible to be unstolen from. Again, a primitive will want to avoid being hurt, and again I think that evolution as well as logic suggest hitting me back harder than I hit.

The problem with this is the possibility of feuds. Suppose I hurt you by accident, and you retaliate. Your thought is that justice has been done, but I think you hurt me, so I retaliate with more force, and the retaliation will escalate until one or both of us are dead or crippled. It is necessary to learn to let go and forgive in a way. We might consider primal forgiveness as the attitude that hurting somebody we're angry at is really not going to help anything, and that we will have to live with that person in the future.

Now, let's fast forward myriads of years, and look at the situation. Many of us live in large conglomerations of humanity, and have good reason to stay living in these cities. If everybody goes around hitting other people themselves, we get chaos followed by the rule of the strong. Once the strong have taken over, factions of the weak might upset their rule. The fundamental principles here are that the rulers are always insecure, and the ruled even more so. If we want to be civilized (which originally means something like "fit to live in cities"), we have to find another way to live.

Suppose we create an organization whose job it is to determine who owns what, and who hurts whom. By placing some sort of limits, we get a reasonably predictable and livable system. When some of our stuff is stolen, we report it to this organization, which tries to reclaim it for us and hurt the thief. When somebody hurts us, we again report it, and the organization hurts our assailant. This may not quite satisfy our craving for primal justice, but at least mollifies it, and serves the original purposes.

Trying to choose the limits is difficult at best. We can't give the organization complete authority over hurting; if somebody insults me, it is hardly desirable for me to call in some official to insult that person back. We have to have some domain for me to do my own hurting of others. If I can hurt others as I see fit, we have chaos; if I can't hurt others, the organization is far too busy and unable to judge what's going on.

I don't think any solution is completely satisfactory. The general rule in use is that physical hurting is confined to the government, but that is hardly sufficient for political philosophy. There are several questions that can be asked.

Should the government be based more on laws or on human judgements? If the government is based on laws, we find that one bad law can cause an awful lot of unnecessary suffering, and even with generally good laws we will find cases where the law doesn't handle the situation properly, since the law cannot cover all circumstances. If the government is based on judgements, the government can be more flexible, and one human judging cannot cause as much harm as one bad law, but one human unrestrained by law is still very dangerous. The right answer seems to be somewhere inbetween, leaning towards rule by law.

What should the economic model be? Since the government will be responsible for deciding questions of ownership, the government will essentially define what is property and what isn't. Obviously, we want personal property to be property. For business purposes, we need to have certain agreed expectations defined as property. Suppose that you want to make and sell rhubarbburgers, and don't have enough rhubarb, and want some from me. Suppose further that you're entering this business on a shoestring, and can't just buy or barter for my rhubarb. I could give you the rhubarb on the condition that I will get a share of the profits. This is an example of an intangible piece of property. Another example would be intellectual property, which is simply the right to prevent people from copying or making certain things. (The fact that this is for practical purposes is recognized in the U.S. Constitution, where Congress is given authority to create patents and copyrights in order to advance the useful arts.)

Another odd concept of ownership is land. Right now, my wife and I "own" a small piece of land. We didn't make the land ourselves, and no matter how far back you trace the ownership you'll find that the owners didn't make the land. We can't pick it up and take it elsewhere. For that matter, it's a variety of ownership that isn't really matched in other things. We "own" the land, except that we have to pay taxes or it will be "taken away" from us. Nobody's going to legally deprive me of my pocket knife on the grounds that I haven't paid the tax.

One popular solution is to allow ownership of anything, or almost anything, and ban private violence. Historically, this has led to disaster. It turns out that, under these circumstances, those with property tend to get more property, and no other determining factor is even close. Eventually, the rich take over the government, and the social order collapses.

Let's consider the primal justice of such laissez-faire capitalism. If I have money and you don't, then in the future I will have lots more money and you won't. You're at my mercy. I own the land and the workplaces, so you can't go anywhere or produce anything without my permission. It is obvious that I can hurt you severely. It is equally obvious that you can't hurt me back without illegal acts. This sort of society denies the idea of primal justice. While some people seem to see it as the epitome of freedom, I see it as a way for some people to set up a government so everybody has to play by their rules. It's a nice setup if you can get it.

This brings up another issue: that those who control the government are likely to ensure that they can hurt others, by some means or other, and will try to ensure that they cannot be legally hurt. This gives them the best chance at satisfying their primal justice, and it would be very risky to trust humans to not abuse this power. Therefore, the government has to have a large base of control.

Now, let's consider government ownership of land and the means of production. This has a certain theoretical attraction, avoiding altogether the dangers of the robber baron. It is usually associated with some method of distributing property equally in some sense or another, which accords with our instinctive belief that people are more or less equal (well, more accurately, our belief that nobody is better than we are - equality is a fairly stable solution here). (The job of figuring out how to motivate people other than by giving them more stuff or more personal authority is left as an exercise to the reader, just as it is in all writings on Socialist Utopias.)

On the other hand, it puts the government in the position of deciding who gets to try what. Suppose you have a great idea for a new business. If the government controls the capital and the land, then you have to convince the government to let you try it. We've seen above that we can operate on inflexible rules or abusive personal power, and it's difficult to run an economy on either. If individual people control, or perhaps own, capital and land, you can try to talk to several different people. If you can't convince any of them to back you, maybe your idea wasn't any good; conversely, if it is good, you've got a much better chance of getting backing in this society. In the old Soviet Union, a new business was typically an arm of the Government, and would generally be established enough to continue operating even if it would never make money. In the United States, the vast majority of new businesses don't survive five years. The consequence is that the U.S. economy could afford to be much more experimental than the old Soviet economy, and it succeeded much better.

We are therefore able to conclude from history what a government must be like in order to satisfy primal justice.

It must permit ownership of personal property. It must enforce binding contracts. It probably needs to recognize something at least similar to owning land. It needs to allow private control of the means of production. It must establish a complete monopoly on certain sorts of violence, and it must have some way of protecting citizens from other forms of violence. If nothing else, it needs to assure each citizen a chance at a reasonable life. It probably has to be some sort of democracy to be stable under these constraints.