An occasionally updated list of things seen, heard, read:
1. The nine hottest Madonna videos of all time, compiled by The Beast.
2. Staying with music, Nilanjana Roy makes a compelling case for why the next Nobel Laureate in literature needs to be Robert Zimmerman Bob Dylan.
3. Picked up, in course of a bookshop raid yesterday, Amartya Sen’s The Idea of Justice. I’ll likely inflict more on it once I get through the books I’m reading now and pick up Sen’s latest. In the interim, just stumbled on this appreciation in The Chronicle. Carlin Romano underlines the perennial fascination of this subject: justice is something everyone wants, yet no one has been able to adequately define.
More accurately, Another Idea of Justice
Plato argued, through his familiar Socratic ventriloquy, that justice is divine, an ideal to which human justice can only haltingly aspire. Aristotle then introduced a formal criterion of justice that still wins the greatest agreement, perhaps because it’s merely formal: Treat equals equally and unequals unequally.
From then on, follow the history of philosophers’ sentences that begin “Justice is … ” on and you hit so many diverse endings you wonder whether anyone, including the lady in the blindfold, knows what justice is.
To Aquinas, it’s “a certain rectitude of mind whereby a man does what he ought to do in the circumstances confronting him.” To Hume, it’s “nothing but an artificial invention.” To Sir Edward Coke, it’s “the daughter of the law, for the law bringeth her forth.” To 20th-century American jurist Learned Hand, it’s “the tolerable accommodation of the conflicting interests of society.” Do a survey, and about the only thinker who invites instant agreement is Belgian philosopher of law Chaim Perelman. According to Perelman, justice is simply “a confused concept.”
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