The Pope Speaks

[jonsonite]

Here's a Financial Times article about Pope Benedict XVI's newest encyclical, Caritas in Veritate. In it the Pope talks about, among other things, justice. (all excerpts are from the article, not the encyclical)

Unfortunately, one of the lost insights concerns justice. The Pope would like us to think about justice as having three aspects. There is

Comments

[jonsonite]

The word "FaceTube"--I can never truly get that out of my mind now, you know.

What I'm trying to say is that absent fraud or coercion (which includes ponzi schemes, which are illegal, and stealing, which is also illegal), the pricing of goods in trade is not a matter of justice, but of natural laws. There's no more justice or injustice in a free exchange of goods than there is in a beaver dam or a flash-flood. It's just two mutually consenting people doing something they want to do.

Recognizing that absent fraud and coercion business has nothing to do with justice, we wisely outlaw fraud and coercion and largely leave business to itself, except for the giant heaps of government regulation that we sprinkle all over everything. Since government regulation constitutes coercion, it tends to distort the markets and perhaps introduce injustices into the system. But in its natural state, when people are voluntarily and honestly exchanging goods and services, there is no justice.

That's why "commutative justice" doesn't seem to mean anything to me.

[bayashi314]

In a perfectly set-up natural world, wouldn't the laws of survival keep the idiot with 10,000,000 from getting to a point where he could lose it to the smart guy with a legal and slightly imbalanced plan (sell you 1 peanut for 10,000,000!). I admit my point is taken from an extreme and / or the Simpsons.

If we're going to reference natural laws, don't we need to ensure we have a better process of vetting the lower level laws? It feels like we're saying "Commutative justice" is just "trade" and should follow natural laws (with fraud and coercion restrictions). Why then do I feel like we let people have a lot of ability to violate / lose at these laws quite quickly with little or no training / leveling up? Base analogy - "Wow! I've got all these cool magic weapons and such. How did I get to be a L15 samurai? Sweet! Ummm...I'll cast magic missile at the darkness!"

I see things like that all the time in observing neighbors, some friends, and strangers making odd purchases and engaging in financial behavior that I don't quite get or understand.

[jonsonite]

Well, people who make bad decisions and take risks that don't pay off do lose their shorts all the time. But that isn't unjust. In the absence of fraud or coercion, they're voluntarily making bad decisions, and so there's no injustice in bad things happening to them. Conversely, the people who make good decisions have good things happen to them, and there's no injustice in that either. There's a healthy dose of luck as well, but you can mitigate that by taking a risk-averse strategy. If you choose to take risks, you don't really get to complain that there's luck in the game.

Often, of course, this is self-correcting. People make stupid mistakes when they're young, they lose their shorts, and then work their asses off to get back in the game. It's the people who wait to make their mistakes until they're too old to recover who are in real trouble.

[bayashi314]

Wouldn't a system that truly follows the "natural laws" not allow someone to get to that point (old person making huge risk for first time)? I mean, evolution didn't allow apes to develop guns without the foresight to understand what killing via a gun meant. I acknowledge I am anthropomorphizing evolution here.

[jonsonite]

Natural selection requires that creatures be allowed to fail.

[bayashi314]

Good point.