The Pros And Cons Of Justice

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What is justice? If one were to ask any number of individuals, and they would likely get the same number of answers. Justice is revenge for one’s loved ones. Justice is the equality of human rights regardless of race, gender, and sexual orientation . Justice is impartiality when dealing with perceived injustices, and that alone proves that it is impossible for justice to be exist, let alone be implemented in human society. Since the dawn of civilisation, humankind has searched for a way to define justice and punish criminals for their wrongs, leading to the birth of various law codes, all of which can be unjust, and all law codes are flawed by default as they require humans to determine if one is a criminal. To begin with, the mere concept…show more content…
Are we trying to return to the Draconian constitution, when almost all crimes were punished by death, and therefore equal? Or to the code of Hammurabi, with the famous inscription of 'an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth'? These law codes fell into disuse as they did not accommodate the social changes that took place and were deemed overly harsh. Yet in the face of true justice, one needs to discard all notions of cruelty, of mercy, and of kindness. One needs to ignore the countless shades of grey between good and evil , to jump between the extremes of possibility, to decide if one is a saint or a devil. And in this choice lies a human life, now in the hands of other humans--- the judge and the jury. How are they superior to the rest of the human race in that they get to decide the fate of a human being? They are but mere humans--- they are far from faultless and have proved themselves fallible countless times. Again, all humans are incapable of being truly detached, and this is not fair towards the accused. Even now, too many innocent people live behind bars--- is this justice? Or is this the beginning of, as Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote in his award-winning musical, Hamilton, ‘an endless cycle of vengeance and death with no
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