"If predation is the only way your political philosophy can persist, why would you want any part of it?"
(...) we are all about to be involuntarily inducted into a cannibal cult. My question for you: Will you choose to be devoured by your neighbors, or will you elect to devour them instead? –GSS
What I want to discuss is Socrates’ question about whether it is better to inflict an injury or to have an injury inflicted upon you. It’s a favorite of sophists and sophomores, I know, but I think it strikes at the very core of justice. The justice I seek and seek to defend is not “out there”, apart from myself. Justice (or injustice) is not what others do to me, it’s what I do to myself and to others. Where I find myself availing myself of the fallacies tu quoque or two wrongs make a right, I am rationalizing injustice, and the worst havoc I am wreaking is upon my own ego.The Nazarene’s answer to Socrates was this: It is better to have an injury inflicted upon you, because redemption is still possible to one who has not inflicted injury upon another. I don’t believe in an afterlife and I don’t believe redemption hinges upon any one event. But I do believe that a “justice” that is itself unjust is vain at best and evil at worst. (...)
