In the play hamlet, justice is a big part of the main story as hamlet tries
to find out what justice is after he learns that his father was murdered and he
finds out that his uncle was responsible. As Hamlet attempts to bring justice
to his uncle he finds that justice is more complicated than most people
imagine.
In many ways justice is even more
complicated in real life than how it is described in hamlet because most of the
time justice is enforced using organizations instead of individuals. This means
that for a crime to be punished it has to wait for the organization to decide
on the sentence. When an individual enforces justice they can decide on the
sentence much sooner, but may have more biased views. The conflict between
enforcement by a group which is less biased but takes more time and enforcement
by an individual who can enforce justice quickly but is more likely to be
biased.
This brings us to my question for this blog, is justice attainable in the
real world. Since it is nearly impossible for a person to be completely
unbiased, there is no perfect way to determine who is guilty of a crime, how
they should be punished, or even if there should be a law against what they
did. The only way to make sure that a decision is less biased is to use a group
so members of the group can persuade other members who are biased, which means
that they are more likely to be unbiased but will need time to discuss.
That brings up another part of my
question, is there a timeline to justice. If a certain amount of time passes
and justice is not served to the criminal, can it become too late to punish him?
A good example is if you catch a dog chewing a shoe and punish him twenty
minutes later, the dog will not understand what the punishment is for and it
will just seem like unnecessary cruelty. The question is, does this same
property apply to people too. As mentioned earlier, a large group deciding on a
sentence would be more accurate but take more time. By that logic a larger
group takes longer to come to a decision and will be more accurate, but
eventually the group will take so much time that punishing the criminal would
not make sense anymore.
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