Justice obsession?

Post Reply New Topic

This is something which has always been part of my life to be honest. But I must say it turned much harder when, some years ago, I spent a huge amount of time thinking about what it is and what's the best procedure to get the answers. Justice obsesses me. Whatever I do, whatever the circumstances are, I always have myself wonder how fair things surrounding me (and especially my actions) are. Someway I think this is not necessarily bad as it forces me to develop self-consciousness and go for the best options possible, getting the best out of the worst and working towards positive objectives. But, at times, it also causes me some killer thoughts which lead me to be sad because I can't help and be indifferent.

I'd like to know if this happens to any of you as well. This thing goes so far that I spend my whole life being critical with almost everything, which can be tiring for those who aren't so worried about it.

Thanks in advance (and sorry for any grammar mistakes I made).

I suffer greatly because of my wanting fairness and justice. The world is mostly not fair or just and I cannot deal with it.

One of my parents was a Magistrate, I blame it on them

Yup......I guess it's part of pathological honesty. I'm always hyper-aware of fairness and unfairness. I hate any kind of deception unless it's done in self-defense, and even then I view it with suspicion. I can be very Ned Flanders about right and wrong, though I'm aware of the problem and often compensate. Interestingly, when I do that, then if the result allows me more freedom than I would have from my rigid Aspie approach, I feel as if I've just pulled off a successful scam - "those idiots will never realise I cheated." Then I feel guilty, but I also feel rather pleased with myself because I seem to have got one over on the common herd, which is I guess what alpha-males are supposed to do. I suppose one side effect of obsessing over ethics is that deepdown I'm heartily sick of disadvantaging myself for the sake of purity and virtue.....where has it got me? Do people like me more for it? I think not. So I often feel sorely tempted to push over the whole moral apple cart, and just tell people what I'm going to do to them if they piss me off any more, i.e. might is right. Not that I've done any harm with that feeling.....all in all, I just don't like being harmful.

Dad had many autistic traits too. One time I sent off a few Weetabix box tops and a bit of money to get a "10-in-one-scope" toy. The toy didn't arrive and we had to write to them a couple of times, then they sent two. Dad agonised about whether I should send one back, weighing up all the angles.....and he finally declared that although it wasn't really right, in practical terms it would probably cost them more in refunded postage and handling time than the toy was worth, so it was OK for me to proceed - but it was only just OK. He didn't want me running away with the idea that it was fine to take advantage of other people's mistakes, even if those people weren't very ethical themselves.

I've read that Aspie justice is rather different to NT justice. Our idea of justice, it seems, is based more on logic and mathematical parity and the rules we formulate are too pure and simplistic to be properly applicable to something as complex, messy and flawed as people. NT justice is heavily influenced by emotion. Apparently normal people usually feel there's a difference between the morality of pressing a button that will kill one man but save the lives of 10 others, and the morality of actively pushing that man to his death in order to save 10 lives. For me, there's no moral difference at all.......I'd just feel more reluctant to do the deed without the remote control because of the emotional impact the experience would likely have on me. It would be interesting to see if other Aspies share my views on this.

Other reasons for the Aspie sense of justice are rigid, black and white thinking and a liking for order. So, to me, all motorists who park on the pavement are selfish bastards. It takes me some time to take into account whether or not the deed has caused any real harm. I'm a socialist-anarchist who is suspicious of the concept of property, but I'm prone to get very annoyed if I should once get it into my head that a thing is mine, if anybody else should take it without asking. My favourite sarcastic comment at such times is "I see the ownership of the said item has become blurred." I like to think I'm generous, and don't need to label much as my stuff, but mine means mine.

I have a lot of homespun ethics ideas that the mainstream seems to ignore. For example, when somebody gives you a job, you each sign a contract which defines the rights and responsibilites of both parties. Now to my mind, neither side has any right to unilaterally change that contract, not ever. I can't cut my working hours unless I cheat. But managements frequently impose top-down changes to working hours and conditions as if this was in some way ethical. How would you feel if you agreed to buy something in a shop, and then when you went to pay for it, they hiked the price and charged you more than the price tag said? I can never quite understand why people don't thank me for these insights.....after all, they look pretty watertight logically.......but I'm always left with the impression that I've been thinking too much, and have somehow left the path of wisdom.

I guess the whole problem with homespun ethics is that each individual would have their own unique code of conduct.......for ethics (i.e. social rules) to be at all workable, there has to be a consensus, a common code. But for me that always comes unstuck when the common code is in conflict with my own ideas of right and wrong. I can't seem to let go of the crazy notion that morality is an absolute that can be objectively worked out, even though intellectually I know perfectly well that morality depends entirely on the group it's being applied to.

This is one of the reasons that friendships are difficult, imo. Friends generally want you to be biased towards them, not fair.

Yeah. I wouldn't call it "suffering" or anything, though. It's just how I'm built. I naturally want things to be fair for everyone.

Almost everybody has some sense of fairness. Without it I don't think we could have an orderly society.

My rule is "thou shalt not reinforce the prejudices of thy loved ones." I got the idea from a blurb on what to expect from counselling, and I thought, "well yes, if you really want to help somebody, you won't feed them crap about them being right and the world being wrong when you know it's not true." But it's a thankless task to stick to that when a partner is venting........they always look so betrayed. Often I can't bear the way people demonise others when they're feeling frustrated or threatened, and I have to say "look, nobody's THAT bad."

What's going on here? Do most NTs just egg on their loved ones' self-defeating bigotry, telling them what they want to hear, as a cheap ploy to ingratiate themselves? Are they really that shallow and cynical? Heck, I once heard a shrink say that love is giving a partner what they need rather than what they want, even if they don't realise they need it. Was he an Aspie? And would most people eventually see the point and realise they were being cared for in a very deep way?

My husband has a rigid sense of fairness and justice that he believes to be absolute. He is also somewhat of a vigilante in that he feels the desire to personally punish those who have done wrong (although he hasn't really carried anything like that out he expresses desires to do so frequently). This viewpoint of the world causes him great difficulty since he is unable to just "go with the flow" and feels the unsupressable urge to correct every injustice he encounters.

I can't imagine acting any other way towards people I care about. This also frustrates my husband because he feels like I'm against him. I'm not, I'm FOR him and I want to help. If I was against him I'd say "Yeah you're totally right, those people are complete scum."

I did semi-seriously toy with the idea of becoming "Paintspray Man" - a vigilante who would give pavement parkers something to remember. But one eventually learns to laugh at these things and look for something a bit more interesting and safe to do. Still, an outlet for all these pent-up feelings of moral indignation would probably be good. I sometimes think that if I joined a pressure group to help fight some or other injustice I get vexed about, then I might feel less frustrated and powerless, knowing that I was at least doing something veguely effective about the world's shortcomings instead of ranting and fantasizing about them. But group-joining opens up a whole other can of worms.

I never got the role of emotion in justice. When I learned about the French jury system in class (jurors are ultimately meant to vote in accordance with conscience vs. the American system in which they are instructed to adhere to the law only) I thought that it was stupid, then it was pointed out the American jurors almost certainly do that anyway but pretend to be "rational" and it was like...."oh."



The tricky bit in my view is the absolute certainty of the long term effect of the choice, doubt changes the equation seriously. But yes, I get mad when people say "a human life has infinite value," because that would mean there is no moral difference to killing one person and killing everyone since infinity+infinity=infinity (charming thought). Someone once tried to dodge this by saying each person is a "universe" but got mad when I simply rephrased the question by putting the word "universe" in place of "person" (which changes nothing) since it destroyed their means of avoiding morality.

Of course, another reflection of emotion is that as far as I can tell most people (at least in my country) would also approve of killing dozens of (innocent) people of another nationality on the mere chance of saving one of their own, although I sometimes wonder about the exact ratio.



Attempts to put morality on a basis of objective logic (not basing it on divine writ) are not unprecedented. Immanuel Kant comes to mind. They just tend not be popularly successful even when they prove attractive to intellectuals and philosophers, because few people want to learn and most are not trained (or intuitively able) to think in such a way.

I can see myself in your description. First of all, there's no way that I consider "Justice" is a cultural product that can be transformed throughout ages. I think Justice resides in the idea of "Respecting every sentient living will and welfare as long as it doesn't focus on harm", and I think it's an optimal idea until I find flaws in it. So you'll never do anything against anyone unless their objective is harm itself. For example, you will let anyone do whatever they want with their environment as far as it doesn't mean damage, otherwise, if the activity will injure any sentient being (and so destroying nature hurts animals), you can do something to stop it without breaking the rule. But, as you said, I also think this is a very rigid imperative that leaves me feeling I'm one of those who spend lots of time thinking about the concept without meaning to change things. I really hate those philosophers or thinkers who consider themselves superior because they think they have the key, but remain static in front of actual problems. Whenever I can, I try to go and help those who really need it. And to figure out who are the ones who need it most, I wonder what sentient beings have the biggest problems to defend themselves, to work their problems and make them disappear. I think that, when you're allowed to have the life you want for yourself and your loved ones, there's much to be thankful for, because there's plenty of conditions you can't control and don't disable you to be who you want and do what you like. In this position I think helping others is deontological, a moral duty.

It's still theoretical, but I think I materialize these aspects this way.

(once again sorry for any mistakes, if you see any I'd be glad to be told =D)

In the UK also, the jury is often instructed to disregard what they've just heard. I don't see how they can......I think it would be more respectful and effective to just explain why the material was considered to be misleading. There was one case where the judge was royally pissed off because the jury found a guy not guilty, which was technically the wrong decision, but they were aware of the politics of the situation and (rightly in my opinion) concluded that the guy was more a hero than a villain....he'd broken a law that many people felt was an odiously unjust law, and the gov was trying to make an example of him to scare others off from doing likewise). Judges are really supposed to be impartial of course, but I doubt that's humanly possible, though I'm sure many of them get pretty close to it at times. The law really looks technical and objective when you see the actual statutes with their precise legal phrasing........perhaps that's what fools us into thinking that it's possible to just run it robotically and get perfect justice out of the other end.


Sounds like my initial response to the theoretical dilemma "if you had to choose between killing yourself and killing your child, what would you do?" - my answer was to put all available energy into breaking that constraint, and finding a solution that allowed everybody to live. It's true that these thought experiments could rarely exist in the real world of course. So to answer such a question meaningfully, it's necessary to accept impossible circumstances such as knowing for an absolute fact that you will save 10 lives if you do X. As you say, in the real world there is always doubt, and doubt changes everything. But the world of ethics is more akin to physics with its perfect black-body generators and infinitely distant objects sending out perfectly parallel waves of radiation.


African shoots Caucasian, death sentence. Caucasian shoots African, slap on wrists. At least that's how they say it used to be. And I'll bet the people who ran that system paid lip-service to all being equal under the law. The law seems to find a way of pandering to the prevalent social mores, however inconsistent they are with their stated principles. I find it really weird that the ancients such as Plato could discuss ethics in such painstaking depth, lay down the most wonderful egalitarian, democratic principles for running a society free of tyranny, and yet have no problem with denying the slave class most of those rights. At what point in human history did somebody first realise that slaves were human with feelings just like their own? Was it not always self-evident? The human brain is so good at creating these logic-tight barriers so that it can break its own rules mre easily, and that makes me wonder if we're ever going to be able think our way to justice.


The Evangelicals in the 19th century managed to get some of their "utilitarianism" popularised, I think. They had a big thing about a principle of delivering the maximum happiness for the maximum number of people. But I think most folks go more on their gut reactions, which is probably just as bad.......to the emotions, one death is a tragedy but a million deaths is just a statistic. The Utilitarians would presumably take more notice of the million, which I suppose is correct.

I had been thinking more of the cavalier attitude they have towards collateral damage.

I'm not sure if this relates, maybe loosely...

But I always have the urge to contact people (through email... phone not good) whenever I experience a service that isn't at least average. Anything from cake shops to train services or just anywhere where I experience bad service, bad value for money, have been short-changed or notice some kind of unfairness towards me and others as customers... then I'm strongly compelled to send an email of complaint. Sometimes I get free vouchers out of it!! (Though, that's not why I do it)

Just today I received a reply letter to a complaint I made about the terrible, unfair, rip-off service I experienced not long ago at a train station. They made up for the money I lost, but the letter was very assuming of me and quite rude and condescending, telling me I should have done this or that when there was NO option to do so. So I'm going to reply back to that letter telling them I'm not an idiot, that they're rude and the reasons why I couldn't do what they suggested in the letter.

I guess I just can't help it. I'm quite a hot-headed person, too. Sometimes I just can't let things go and allow people to get away with it.

I've always considered myself to have an abnormally strong sense of Justice compared to those around me. I just have a literal hate for dishonesty and unfairness. I doubt I could even cheat on a test to save my life and I even tend to see non-verbal misunderstandings as unfairness to the listener so I always have a stronge urge to fix such misunderstandings as quickly as possible. I also have this belief that regardless of rank or status, there is always room for improvement within one's self. Because of this, I have a terrible habit of calling someone out on their wrongdoings or correcting them when the opportunity arises. Unfortunately, I tend to have more negative results with such situations compared to positive, but at least my friends have told me directly that they do enjoy that part of me, so I guess it all works out in the end.

When I was a kid I may or may not have been bullied quite a bit. I don't really know, since I have no idea what their intentions were. All I know is I took a lot of s**t from "dominant" people and never complained (verbally, at least). I was small, sickly, rather slow, and quite different. I never willingly played team sports and instead aimed at becoming stronger, like the characters from the Dragon Ball Z cartoons that I used to watch. It lessened during high school, when I was doing 500 pushups every day instead of doing whatever it was high school sophomores and juniors did.

In college I was stronger and fighting competitively in legitimate competitions, and was pretty much in good terms with everyone. I did have a special relationship with the so-called "underdogs" though, particularly the special needs dudes and the unsocial virgin librarian who played Tekken every day then went straight home. (I trained him in a little boxing, and tried to get his confidence up.) Anyway, a group of cocky college freshmen show up one schoolyear and started acting all bad-ass, making fun of one of our quiet anime and video game-loving older students. So I did a little intimidation by the door. The kid brought a bodyguard for the next few months and his group was extra-nice to our guy. I really don't know if I was using my martial skills and reputation to enforce justice or I was just using them to be a dick to the new guys. Because I kind of felt like a bully.

Presently, I kind of have a tendency to tease people a lot, and they don't do s**t about it because they think I'll do some crazy ninja sh*t to them. It sucks because I never know when I am going too far, but personally I know that it's usually all in good fun. But whenever some nobody wants to try acting like a tough guy I always feel the need to challenge it. I don't know if it's a desire for justice by eliminating bullies, or if it's because I'm unaware that I'm actually the bully and I just don't like having any competition. I don't know if I'm going with "peace is having a bigger stick than the other guy", or I just get off to the fact that I currently have the biggest stick and would like to keep it that way.

I guess you do "either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain". Sorry for the overly-long story.