The ultimate goal of my Humanities Portfolio is to define justice. The definition that I have settled upon has a visual/graphical component. For my nontextual Something New, I have portrayed justice in a stop-motion video. My theme, Absence, is crucial to the visual idea of justice.
The bullet points below the video make up part of my Definition of Justice. After watching the video and reading the listed explanation, you might consider returning to my Definition of Justice. Hopefully, this combination of visual and textual elements will allow you to fully grasp my personal conception of justice.
Graphing Justice
- If one were to draw historical events on a graph, they would form a line.
- Each point on this line would represent an action or event in history.
- Each point is aligned with an objective moral law. Thus, the line represents a path of objective morality.
- When an event strays from the moral law, it departs from the line. This departure represents an act of injustice.
- The unjust event begins a new line of historical actions, a new path of morality. The new line is shaped by its distance from the original moral law. (An unjust act can move away from the moral law in either direction – this is why some of the stars are above the line and some are below, in the video).
- Empty space is key to understanding this graph. The empty space in the graph presses upon the new historical line. So long as empty space remains, so does injustice.
- In order to close the gap between the existing line and the aberration, one must take action.
- This is the definition of justice: taking action where it is called for, whether for yourself or on behalf of others.
- An act of justice fills the space between the old and new lines of morality. One action may cover significant ground while another barely makes an impact. Even though some actions are more impactful than others, no one type of action (e.g. legal, creative, etc.) is more valid than another.
- Crucially, justice is not a goal in and of itself. Rather, justice is the response that restores morality to the world. Justice exists as an answer to injustice.
- Even if acts of justice manage to restore the world to the original moral law (and the possibility of this is debatable), that victory does not erase past iterations of the graph. Once injustice occurs, that empty space exists forever, if only in memories of the past.
