We Must Say No To Thirsty Justice

About this episode

The episode explores the differences between Stoic Justice and modern interpretations of justice, emphasizing the importance of giving each person what is owed to them.

Register for the May 9th workshop today: https://tannerocampbell.com/may -- In this episode I work through how Stoic Justice differs from what we moderns typically mean by the word — because when we say "justice" today, we almost always mean retribution: rewards for the deserving, punishments for the rest. Stoic Justice isn't concerned with desert in that sense at all. It's concerned with giving each person what is owed to them as a fellow member of the Cosmopolis, and failing to do that is, on Stoic terms, about as serious a moral error as you can commit. Along the way I push back on the fairly common claim that Justice is the "highest" of the cardinal virtues — the one that orients all the others and without which courage collapses into bravado, temperance into private self-management, and wisdom into mere cleverness. I grant the intuition has some force, but antakolouthia — the mutual entailment of the virtues — rules out any hierarchy, and I note that Marcus, contrary to what some popular communicators like to imply, isn't in the camp that elevates Justice above the rest. From there I trace how our thirst for a culprit is eating away at social cohesion in the West. The older…

People in this episode

Host: Tanner Campbell

Topics covered

• Stoic Justice
• retribution
• moral error
• cardinal virtues
• social cohesion
• culprit
• western instinct

Keywords

• Stoicism
• justice
• retribution
• moral philosophy
• social cohesion
• virtues
• culprit
• Cosmopolis

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Cosmopolis

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