I just read an interesting article concerning jury nullification and it got me thinking. When I came across the subject, which I had never heard of before, I thought that it meant that the decision of the jury had been overturned. As it turned out, the term means that the jury has the right to judge the law as well as the facts of the case. This has been a part of English Common Law for over 1000 years and it is a legal principle in the land of the free and the home of the brave. A self governing people must have the right to overrule its rulers.

That was not enough for a full episode of stand up philosophy. I would not waste your time with a dry history paper in this place, even though you are really here to see the comic that is higher up the page and would not read this part of the page. But then again, if you were not reading this part of the page, then you would not know what I just wrote. The truth is that it would be too heavy and significant of a subject for me. My specialty, even as an amateur, is the dialectic.

So, what is justice? From James Locke, natural law implies that there are moral laws impressed upon the universe that are just as natural to the state of the universe as the physical laws impressed upon creation by the same creator. That is, of course, an oversimplification. Is justice written in the stars and the foundations of the Earth? Even if this is true, then what is justice itself?

There is really no self evident reason why murder, theft and rape are wrong. We may not like the results; however, we are imposing a judgement on these actions that goes beyond the material world. Pure materialists reason toward moral anarchy where laws must be created by an elite in order to create justice. Does justice exist where it has not been created by Man? If you were in a land of unjust laws, would you know it?

Of course, if I imply the existence of an unjust law, then I imply that justice must be something more than written law. Utilitarians would argue in the direction of optimizing resources. Even when the law supports an action, that action would be wrong because the results of the action are bad. Would you be able to assess a bad outcome without making a moral judgement in order to determine what a bad outcome is? Evolution demands the extermination of the less fit to survive.

If justice is a thing that you can see in nature, as the consequence of actions, then would justice itself not be a physical force like gravity or magnetism? Are we acquainted with the concept of justice because we can feel this force the way that we can feel heat? Is it comforting that there is an absolute standard of what is good and what is evil? Would you call such a standard restricting?

I have not really answered the question. It is interesting how the simple words that we use every day can be the hardest terms to define. My Sunday school class examined that point with the term ‘grace.’ Maybe I have done my part when I made you think about the things that you take for granted.

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