Justice

For some reason injustice has always bothered me more than I would expect. Looked at as utilitarian style goodness-vs-badness, there are a lot of bad things that aren't necessarily unjust, and there are a lot of unjust things that have fairly mild consequences. Ordinarily I'm happy enough with utilitarianism as a basis for ethics, but there's just something that bothers me in particular about something that's not just wrong, but unfair.

A bit of reflection reminds me of a very similar feeling I get when I'm working on or learning about a system that is designed badly. The concepts don't work, the primitives are badly chosen, or the thing is just plain ugly. I get frustrated by that because I'm looking at the gap between what that system is and what it could be, and it feels like a dissonant chord sounds. The closer-but-not-quite it is, the more frustating it is.

I think in essence my feelings about justice are a specialised form of that same system aesthetic. Bad things happen all the time, but only a small number of bad things make you realise that a societal system that gave rise to them is severely broken. I've come to think of justice as nothing more complex than good system design: a just system is how a well-designed system feels from the inside.