Is Justice Possible in Real Life?
December 11, 2021
Is Justice Possible in Real Life?
Is Justice Possible in Real Life?
The question of whether justice, in the ethical sense, can ever be fully realized inside our social arrangements will not settle itself quickly. I line up with the skeptics, but I still think justice is worth chasing. My position develops by bringing two old sparring partners into the ring, Socrates from Group 1 and Thrasymachus from Group 2. Their clash in Republic provides a clean frame, after which real-world comparisons, biological analogies, and a few game-theory reminders show why a perfect system stays out of reach while an imperfect one remains useful.
1. Socrates and the dream of a well-ordered city
Socrates builds justice from the inside out. A just soul keeps appetite, spirit, and reason in balance. Scale that up, and you get a city where everyone performs the one function that suits natural talent. Rulers legislate wisely, soldiers protect, producers supply daily needs. Crime vanishes because law reflects right reason, and right reason feels obvious once education has straightened every citizen's thinking.
Ants look like the closest living model of this vision. A colony splits labor into queens, workers, and soldiers with no argument about pay or prestige. Each ant plays its role, and the colony, taken as one thing, locates food, builds ventilation, and fends off invaders with machine-like efficiency. Up close the idea feels irresistible: drop selfish wants, stick to your lane, prosper together.
Yet the same ants demonstrate why even perfect obedience can implode. When scouts lose the pheromone trail, they can form a death spiral called an ant mill. Every ant follows the rule of "stick to the track," and the rule drives them in circles until they collapse. After millions of years of evolutionary debugging, that glitch still pops up. If ants cannot reach flawless coordination, humans, armed with emotions, private property, and divergent beliefs, should expect worse.
2. Thrasymachus and the self-interested engine
Thrasymachus cuts through Socratic optimism in one blunt claim: justice is nothing but the advantage of the stronger. Rulers make laws that serve their own interest, and ordinary people call obeying those laws "just" because refusing hurts. The concept of the common good operates as window dressing. Modern writers like Charles Mills and Carole Pateman echo the point when they show how liberal contracts leave racial or gender hierarchies untouched.
Game theory backs the pessimism. In the prisoner's dilemma, each player sees that confessing to a crime lowers personal risk even though mutual silence would help both. Rational individuals still defect, and the cost lands on the pair. Scale that to a pandemic. Public health experts repeat that vaccination plus distancing saves lives, but many people weigh personal inconvenience above communal payoff. The aggregate outcome is preventable illness. Thrasymachus nods and says, "Exactly. Each player maximizes private advantage under the rules that matter to them."
3. Why education alone cannot close the gap
Socrates pins his hopes on guardian schooling. Teach rulers deep math, music, and dialectic, and their souls will align with reason. Locke shares the faith, trusting that wider literacy and civic habits can polish moral life. Global communication seems to confirm the optimism. Ideas about human rights travel faster than ever, so torture and slavery shrink in legal space even if they persist in practice.
Yet the fix will not clinch the argument. Education lags behind events. What reads as enlightened in one decade can look shameful in the next, and no syllabus updates itself overnight. Worse, equal lessons do not yield equal reactions. Drop identical grains of sand from the same height over and over, and each sand-drip castle still collapses along a new fracture. Human temperaments and life stories inject random noise that no teacher can filter out.
4. Complexity sets a hard ceiling
Human societies act like complex adaptive systems, not clockwork machines. Tiny shocks propagate in nonlinear waves. Markets crash, norms flip, storms wipe out infrastructure. A flawless legal code would need to foresee every future context and specify what counts as right in each one, but the set of possible contexts is unbounded. Even if we wrote the code, enforcing it would reopen discretion. Judges interpret nuance, police officers weigh split-second risk, and citizens reinterpret fairness through personal emotion. The very flexibility that keeps the law humane reintroduces the loopholes power can exploit.
5. Justice as a compass, not a destination
My conclusion sounds negative, but it is not useless. Socrates outlines the North Star. Thrasymachus reminds us who drifts off course first when vigilance drops. Holding the pair in tension helps. We will not reach a city with zero crime and perfect allocation of roles, yet we can nudge practice toward wider cooperation and sharper checks on arbitrary dominance. Communication, when it exposes hidden injuries, accelerates that nudge. Social media shames unpaid labor, body cameras reveal improper force, and each disclosure chips away at what Thrasymachus calls the natural order of advantage.
Justice, then, is meaningfully possible only as an asymptote. The line never closes the gap but it guides the climb. That guidance matters. When reforms push sentencing laws closer to proportionality, when pay gaps shrink, when access to vaccination widens, societies inch toward the Platonic dream while keeping Thrasymachus on the radar. The project never ends, which is precisely why it stays worth pursuing.