Dr. Jack Russell Weinstein joins us for this month’s “Philosophical Currents” to delve into the concept of justice, examining how our collective cultures and personal experiences uniquely define its essence.
Interview Transcript
This is Main Street on Prairie Public, I’m Ashley Thornberg. And once a month on the show, we welcome philosopher Dr. Jack Russell Weinstein for a segment called Philosophical Currents. This is when we take a look at a news story with a more philosophical approach.
We pull it apart and pull some threads and provide a little bit more context and analysis and maybe even a little bit more humanity. And heads up to our listeners today, with any young or sensitive ears around, this might not be a Main Street for you. And that is because we will be talking about some very troubling and very adult subjects.
One of the biggest news stories in the state right now, a retired state senator is under indictment for child sex tourism and receipt of child pornography. And here is where the rub is. If he’s found not guilty, his reputation is already ruined.
It’s called the Court of Public Opinion. And if he is guilty, can jail time ever make up for offenses that damage a person on a sole level? And that leads us to explore the broader concept of justice with UND Chester Fritz, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, Dr. Jack Russell Weinstein. Jack, thanks so much for joining us today.
Dr. Jack Russell Weinstein
My pleasure.
Ashley Thornberg
Jack, what shapes our concepts of justice before we even try to define that word?
Dr. Jack Russell Weinstein
Well, this is one of those terms that carries with it the weight of civilization. We have different conceptions of justice based on the time that we’ve lived, based on our religious beliefs, based on our culture, based on even the number of people in society. So visions of justice have ranged from an eye for an eye to elaborate structures of utopia and perfection.
And normally we want to try something in between. And so the problem in talking about justice is that we really are talking about all of culture and all of history and all of human nature at the same time. And that’s pretty burdensome.
Ashley Thornberg
So you as a political philosopher, what do you start to use in terms of trying to come up with a, I presume there’s no such thing as a perfect definition of the word justice, but how do you start to approach narrowing it down so that it’s specific, but also vague enough to include all of the things that you just said?
Dr. Jack Russell Weinstein
Well, so I often tend to do things either chronologically or thematically. But the first thing I want people to understand is that justice is the political version of the word good. It’s analogical to ethics.
And so when we say someone is moral, when we say an act is good or right in a political context, we’re saying it’s just or a person is just. But that in itself only gives us a sort of basic concept. It doesn’t give us a whole conception, a whole story, a whole theory.
And so one of the things I ask my students to think about is whether it makes sense to think of a person as just, whether a person is a politically good person or whether we have to think about it on the societal level and whether or not we have to think about laws and police and government and all those sorts of things. Because Plato, the sort of foundation of our discussion of justice, sees it as doing both. He sees a soul as being just when someone is in harmony, when their intellect and their emotions and their willpower are all in appropriate proportion to who they are.
And he sees something similar in what he calls the city, but what we would call a community or a state where the police, the education and the sort of the money making abilities and the masses are also in harmony, where everyone is doing what they’re supposed to do because of their nature. But we live in a society in where people aren’t given prescribed roles, where people aren’t, their life, their chosen profession, their path, their social role isn’t chosen by birth or isn’t chosen by anything but their individual desires. And that kind of fluidity, that kind of change in a society makes justice infinitely more complicated because you can’t step outside and go, you go there, you go there, you do this, you do this, you do this, which is what Plato wanted to do.
Ashley Thornberg
Jack, do you distinguish, and by you I mean philosophers, distinguish between justice and fairness?
Dr. Jack Russell Weinstein
Fairness is a word that often is used in the concept of justice. And when the general audiences talk about justice, they often mean something similar. They mean something like you should get what you deserve or you should be punished appropriately for a crime or you should be compensated fairly or in the right amount for work.
And you can see this actually early on with Aristotle. Aristotle has this great sort of counterintuitive definition of justice where he says it’s treating equals equally and treating unequals unequally. And what he means by that is you have to treat people according to their social role.
And if they’re on the same social level, you have to treat them the same. But if they’re on different social levels, you have to treat them differently. Like, let’s say, a teacher and a student.
It doesn’t have to be horrible like slave and master or upper level and rich and poor. It’s also teacher and student, boss and employee or things like that. But then in the 1970s, 1960s and 70s, a guy named John Rawls came along and he used the concept of fairness to create a system of justice.
He says that when it’s time to, that the key to justice is not necessarily what justice itself says, but how the society constructs its conception of justice, how it how it creates its rules. And that has to be done in a fair system where everyone gets to participate equally. And he’s got a whole schema and we can talk about that if you want.
But the idea is that fairness predates justice, because if we don’t create a theory of justice in a fair system, then justice is always going to be biased.
Ashley Thornberg
We’re visiting today with philosophy professor Dr. Jack Russell Weinstein and a reminder that there are some very adult themes in today’s show. So sensitive ears might want to skip this episode. Jack, a moment ago, you used a phrase punished appropriately for a crime.
And since we are framing this around the news story of someone being under indictment for child sex tourism and receipts of child pornography. And there is just an overwhelming amount of research that shows that things like sex crimes even can change a person on a genetic level. The expression of the genes to be able to work properly and their entire behavior can be modified for life.
And when it happens, particularly at a young age, the brains might not even develop properly. How can we talk about an appropriate punishment for a crime that can damage a person in a way that might never be able to be fixed?
Dr. Jack Russell Weinstein
So one of the problems here is that when we talk about justice, we tend to equivocate. Equivocation is a logical fallacy that it’s when you change the definition of a word without letting people know you change the definition. So we talk about justice as if it’s one thing, but at minimum, we’re talking about two different things.
We’re talking about the justice system. And then we’re talking about justice, capital J, as in the person getting, again, what they deserve. We talk about the justice system.
We’re talking about the courts. We’re talking about representation. We’re talking about innocent before you’re proven guilty.
We’re talking about an adversarial system in which you have a defendant and a prosecutor. And the test for whether that’s fair, whether that’s working properly, is whether everyone gets treated the same way and whether or not the procedure is followed. So our justice system and this is a little complicated, too, but our justice system is not about truth.
It doesn’t work. The test for whether it works isn’t whether the guilty are found guilty and the innocent are found innocent. The test of our justice system is whether or not the proper procedures are follow and a person gets due process.
And the question of whether this representative gets due process is a question that will only be fleshed out when he and I can say it’s a he when he goes before the courts and gets representation and is evaluated by a jury of his peers, etc., etc., etc. But then when we talk about outside the justice system, we’re talking about this larger question, this question of social justice, this question of justice, collectively, capital J in a society. What if someone didn’t do it, but they’re followed by the rumors for the rest of their life?
What if what happens to the victim after the justice system takes, you know, goes through its process and things like that? And that depends on what aspect we’re talking about, because for the victim, there are a lot of different ideas as to how to deal with it. There’s something called restorative justice, which tries to to heal the person.
There’s ways of advocacy and representation and all sorts of things. And so we have to have a conversation about victims of crimes and what kind of social services they need and what kind of support they need. But then we also have to have conversations about people who’ve been through the justice system, whether they were found innocent or whether they did their time and paid their dues, whether or not the question of whether or not the I’ll take a step back and say one of the one of the things we have to ask is what the purpose of prison is in the first place.
Is it to separate the criminal? Is it to reform the criminal? Is it to punish and have vengeance against the criminal?
Every time we talk about justice as a system or any time we contextualize these things, we have to step back and ask, what are we trying to do in terms of the victim? We’re trying to restore the victim to health and give them back as much of, I don’t know, their innocence, their wholeness, their humanity as we can. But in terms of the perpetrator, we have to ask, what is our goal?
And do we want this person to be a contributing member of society? Can you pay for your sins? Can you renew yourself?
Can you be born again politically? Can you say, look, I recognize that I did this and I’ve healed and I’ve gotten better and I won’t do this anymore. So you treat me like everyone else.
Is that possible? So we’re always balancing justice, lowercase J, justice system, justice structures with justice, capital J, which has to do with the purposes of society and what we want out of a human life.
Ashley Thornberg
We’re visiting today with UND professor of philosophy, Dr. Jack Russell Weinstein. Once a month, we have him in for a segment called Philosophical Currents, where we take a philosophical look at a major news story. And Jack, I wonder, so much of this conversation is kind of not easy, but I’m using air quotes around that word easy right now for you and me.
And we are both researched on this topic and knew that it was going to happen. Or you, on a regular basis, talking with students who are willfully entering into a philosophical conversation. Now, that’s not going to happen in the real world where somebody might hear a news story and just automatically assume innocent or guilty.
How can we be better as as news consumers or, you know, perhaps more broadly as people when we hear stories like this in a way that that can be as fair as possible to both the victims and the alleged perpetrators?
Dr. Jack Russell Weinstein
This is a really hard dance. It’s a really difficult question because what you have to do is straddle the abstract and the concrete. Or what I mean by that is you have to have one foot in the conception of justice, the abstractions, the principles, the laws.
Then you have to have one foot in the realization that we’re talking about real people. We’re talking about a real person who may have committed a crime or may not have committed a crime, a real person who was a victim of the crime or may be a victim of the crime. And two people aren’t, you know, not everyone is victimized in the same way.
One of the issues here is that every society gets to decide what its great evil is, what its core sin is. And that is going to affect how people deal with it happening to them or being perpetrated. And so our society, for whatever reason, has decided that child molestation is the greatest of evils.
Now, this isn’t the case throughout history. And what we’ve called a child has changed throughout history. My wife’s grandmother married when she was 13 and she had her first kid when she was 14.
Now that is considered horrifying. At the time it was considered, I wouldn’t say, you know, the norm, but perfectly within periods. There are in the Kama Sutra, pardon a little bit of a graphic-ness here, but the Kama Sutra has a chapter in which that teaches you how to physically engage in sexual activity with your wife if she’s too young for penetration.
And that is so there are rules, right? There were rules as to how to do these things, quote unquote, healthily or appropriately or things like that. We live in a society in which these things are horrendously taboo and which we were in fluctuation because on the one hand, we’re supposed to not engage in sexual activity with people under 18.
We’re not supposed to be attracted to people under 18. Yet a huge number of fashion models and a huge number of pop culture figures who are sold sexually and and wear skimpy clothes and all this kind of stuff are in their teens. And so we’re facing conflicting messages about how we’re supposed to be sexual and think sexual and all that sort of stuff.
Now, none of that should mean, you know, suggest that I’m excusing anything. What I’m saying is that we as a culture have decided that these that that this great evil has to take priority in our society. And so then we have to balance this principle that we have decided upon with the real humanity of all of the people involved.
And that’s really I mean, it’s hard to do that in our own homes. It’s hard to you know, it’s hard for kids to remember their parents or people. It’s hard to remember that our parents as parents, that our kids are growing and need independence.
It’s hard to remember, you know, as a sort of trivial example, my students will often leave the classroom without saying goodbye in any other context. That would be incredibly rude. But in a classroom, it’s perfectly normal.
It’s easy when when you grow up thinking that your teacher sleeps under the desk when the when the school day is done. Balancing our roles and our context with our individual humanity is one of the hardest things we do. And that’s why literature and art and music and dance and things like that are so important, because it forces us to to encounter another person’s humanity.
Philosophy is not great at that.
Ashley Thornberg
Forces us to encounter another person’s humanity. And then here we use words like child sex tourism and tourism, such a welcoming word. And of course, we want to be promoting this.
And then to me, that speaks to an utter lack of humanity, that that would even be the name of the official charge. Talk a little bit, Jack, about the names of charges and how that can impact how we perceive both the victim and the alleged perpetrator.
Dr. Jack Russell Weinstein
So philosophy has always been intertwined with rhetoric. Rhetoric is two different things. Rhetoric is the study of persuasion, but it’s also our use of language.
And so the words that you choose are going to help define the argument. So child sex tourism, as opposed to sex trafficking, those are going to have different contexts. Some of the coverage of this representative talked about he went across, he went internationally to have sex with someone who was underage.
Other coverage can say he went to have sex with someone who he went to rape someone who was underage. Those words are going to define the argument because they play with our emotions and they give us different connotations and they communicate messages that direct our discussion. And so we have to be really careful in advance as to what language we use and what we don’t.
This is I don’t want to get into the whole Israel Palestine discussion, but one of the things that I’ve noticed in the coverage of Israel and Palestine is that more often than not, when news coverages are talking about the violence caused by Israel, they will say things like Israel says that it bombed, that it did not bomb a hospital, but this has not been verified yet. Or Israel says five people died, but this has not been independently verified. When they talk about Gaza, they don’t use the phrase independently verified.
They’ll say things like five people died or Israel bombed the hospital or things like that. And just the inclusion of words like claimed or independently verified changes the reader, changes the reader’s sympathies and loyalties and establishes in advance who’s the liar and who isn’t, who has to be we have to be suspicious of and who doesn’t. The word rape, the word sex, the word tourism, these do these things that as well.
And so if someone is accused of having sex with someone who is underage as opposed to raping someone, the emotions and the ferocity in which we approach the discussion is going to be very different.
Ashley Thornberg
Jack, in balancing that answer with the earlier answer of there’s a lowercase J justice and an uppercase J justice, how does that ferocity impact those two concepts?
Dr. Jack Russell Weinstein
Well, justice, capital J, that exists in society where emotions are important, where reputation is important, where the decisions we make every day are important. That ferocity really informs how we see other people, how we see ourselves, how we plan. But the court system, the system of justice is designed to allow or minimize that ferocity at different times in the system.
So during the gathering of evidence or during testimony and things like that, that ferocity is tamped down. But during opening and closing statements, that ferocity is part of the theater of the court, because that’s when the lawyers are trying to get the jury or the judge to feel their emotions and strongly to to to get the verdict that they want. And so the structure of the justice system, the structure of the courts and laws is designed to channel those emotions and that ferocity to where it is useful and where it isn’t.
That’s a really interesting phrase, the theater of the court, because I think a lot of us at least like to assume that something in a court of law is going to be decided based on purely rational behavior.
That’s not very likely.
Dr. Jack Russell Weinstein
It’s not very likely. Philosophers have tried for years, and certainly legal studies will portray the Socratic method as purely rational and purely logical. But there is a huge problem.
Even if that were true, which it isn’t, even if that were true, human beings aren’t purely rational. And so to have a justice system that is entirely logical, that doesn’t allow for emotion, that doesn’t allow for metaphor, that doesn’t allow for analogies, that doesn’t allow for art and again theater and things like that, it’s going to misrepresent the human experience and it’s going to misrepresent human nature. We often look at laws and courts and things like that with frustration because they haven’t fixed a problem, that they haven’t filled the holes or connected the dots in a way that we want.
Sometimes that is because the system is incomplete and imperfect, but sometimes that’s because the human experience has holes and gaps and complexities and laws have to reflect the human experience or they’re useless. Because any system of justice that expects us to make perfect decisions or purely logical decisions, it’s not going to be very useful. One of the things that we’ve struggled with with romantic love is historically marriage was about joining families together for economic reasons and maximizing the amount of land or the amount of money or the possibility of survival.
And the person who the spouses had affairs with, that’s where love was. What did they used to call a child born out of wedlock? They would call it a love child, right?
The love is not the husband and the wife. The love was the product of the affair. From Shakespeare onward, we have changed the notion of romantic love and marriage and eventually the legal system to allow for all sorts of complex, irrational, emotional nuances in the human experience.
And we started out with something like Romeo and Juliet, and now we’re competing families had to decide whether or not to let kids get married. And now we’re at the point where we’re talking about gay marriage and trans marriage and looking back at polyamory now for multiple spouses and things like that, because there’s no rational reason why people are gay or straight or bi or asexual. There’s no rational reason why you fall in love with someone.
The laws have to follow that. And so this is really a question of what we mean by human nature and the human experience, even before it’s a question of justice.
Ashley Thornberg
Jack, legal terms tend to be very specific, indicted, charged under investigation. These all mean different things. And this is a function of the legal system.
But it’s very easy for those of us who aren’t legal professionals to use those terms interchangeably. So as ethical news consumers, what do you want people to keep in mind for when they are hearing news stories about crimes, especially ones that are going to spike emotions? And a heads up to our listeners here, his answer gets very frank and may not be appropriate for some young or sensitive listeners.
Dr. Jack Russell Weinstein
Well, the first thing is to recognize that, again, the justice system isn’t about finding truth. It’s about finding fairness, due process. And that’s why actually people aren’t found innocent.
They’re found not guilty because it doesn’t mean that people didn’t do it. It means that people that the state couldn’t make its case because the burden of proof is on the prosecution. And so if the evidence is corrupt or if the lawyer is bad or if there are ambiguities, if there is reasonable doubt in a criminal case, then a guilty person may go free and it might be the just result.
This is what, of course, the O.J. Simpson discussion is about, because everybody pretty much knows and O.J. has pretty much admitted that he killed his wife. But justice was followed because the L.A. police and the L.A. legal system were so corrupt that you couldn’t in good conscience convict anybody on bad evidence. So the first thing to keep in mind is that the justice system is about due process.
It’s not about truth. The second is that human beings, the words we use to describe human beings, frame our perception. And when we read news stories, we have to be aware of how we’re being manipulated.
The often the political framing of the author or the venue, the news channel or the newspaper or things like that. And we do have to recognize that even in the case of the most heinous crimes, this is a human being. And so one of the great questions of our time is how much do we blame society for a perpetrator’s act?
How much we blame biology for a perpetrator’s act? And how much do we blame free will for perpetrator’s act? Because we know that people who are born poor, people who are born in violence, people who are abused as children will repeat that cycle.
Do we treat an abused perpetrator the same way as we view a perpetrator who had a perfectly wonderful life up to that point? That’s a really important question. Do we treat crime as an illness?
Do we treat bad acts as ignorance? How much do we take into account the perception of that the perpetrator was feeling trapped or feeling compelled? What do you do about, let’s say, a pedophile who doesn’t want and is doing everything they can to not abuse someone, and yet they are compelled and do it anyway?
Do we treat that as an addiction the same way that we treat a heroin addict or things like that? One of the questions in modern psychology and modern therapy is, do you create a space for pedophiles to talk about and to sort of engage theoretically in their behavior so that they don’t actually act on it? Right.
A pedophile is not the same thing as abuser. But this is why there’s a question on the table as to whether pedophilia is a sexual orientation. It’s not because we want to give people, pedophiles, the same rights as gay or straight people or anything like that.
It’s the question of whether or not someone is born as a pedophile, whether or not someone is made as a pedophile, because those answers will help us direct the behavior. So now, for example, let’s take deep fakes and artificial intelligence. You can create very, very, very realistic child porn right now that abuses nobody because it’s just fake.
It’s just, you know, cartoons. Would it be useful to give this fake, deep, fake child pornography to pedophiles so they could look at it and relieve themselves if it meant they wouldn’t approach other children, if it meant not acting on real people, or is all depiction of child sex inherently abusive?
Ashley Thornberg
Well, the flip side of that argument is that it dehumanizes children and they don’t distinguish between what they see as an image and what they see in real life.
Dr. Jack Russell Weinstein
But even if we take away the pedophiles’ reaction, right, what they can or can’t distinguish, is just depictions of an inherently immoral period. Is it somehow victimizing children in the abstract? This is going to be a question that’s going to be on the table for the next five or ten years, because the more we have deep fakes, the more we can satisfy our base desires without, quote unquote, victimizing someone.
But we’re still creating these images and these ideas, and we’re giving a place for thought, right? And this is another huge question in justice and in the justice system, which is the relationship between thought and action. We distinguish between murder and manslaughter and negligence by the intention.
So someone who kills someone may have committed murder because they intended to, and it was premeditated, may have committed manslaughter because they intended to, but just at the moment, or may have committed manslaughter, different number of manslaughter depending on the state, via negligence or accident and things like that. So we punish people for their intent. We use hate crimes.
We use the term hate crime to distinguish between someone who’s gotten beat up because they were there versus someone who got beat up because they were black or gay or Jewish or Muslim or something like that. Is it fair to punish people for their thoughts, especially when we can’t control our thoughts famously? And you’ll have known, you and many of the listeners will have heard this.
If I say to you, don’t think of an elephant, there’s no way you can’t think of an elephant. Whatever you do, whatever you do, Ashley, don’t think about an elephant. Stop thinking about an elephant.
Don’t think about it. All you’re going to do is think about an elephant. We can’t absolutely control our thoughts.
Even Catholicism has to have confessional because Catholicism demands that we’re held accountable for our thoughts, for our desires, for our lusts, for our greed. But since you can’t help doing that, you have to have a confession in which you are absolved of those thoughts. And so how much do we include the lack of internal control in a justice system that is designed to regulate our external actions?
Deep, deep questions about human nature and about how we regulate society.
Ashley Thornberg
All of which could be individual episodes of philosophical currents. But Jack, I want to lock in on those phrases like a system that looks at a lack of control and maybe even is considering looking at crime as a possible illness. And then you said earlier, the system is not about truth.
It’s about due process. Is it fair to me to say that it seems like all of this is just designed to protect the alleged perpetrators? And it feels a little like the victims are just kind of left in the dust.
Even the words that other people are allowed to say when talking about a crime are limited. What does all of this say about how we feel about victims of crime?
Dr. Jack Russell Weinstein
Is a really interesting and important question to ask whether our justice system itself victimizes people and whether or not anyone who goes into the justice system, whether they’re innocent or not, whether they themselves are victim or not, can erase the stain of the accusation. We also have to recognize that. The victims who aren’t accused are themselves people who have to live with having suffered through crimes, having suffered through violence.
And the place for that isn’t the justice system. The place for that is the social system. The place for that is therapy and medical care and things like that.
And that’s why when you when you invest all of this money on being hard on crime, but you don’t invest money in caring for the victims or the aftermath of crime, you are distorting the society and you are distorting who gets the attention. If you have 500 prosecutors but three social workers, the victims are never going to get help. If you have.
Three strikes and you’re out rules, but you don’t have state sponsored or health insurance sponsored therapy or you don’t have insurance programs or you don’t have government programs to help people get their life back together, then all you’re doing is focusing on the perpetrator as well. And so part of the problem here is that in many society, in many states, in many communities, the way that people get elected is by using the rhetoric of being tough on crime, putting everyone in jail, shoot first, ask questions later. It’s much harder to get elected by saying, look, what we need are vast number of therapists, vast number of halfway houses, vast numbers of medical care, psychiatric care for the victims, for the for the people who’ve come out of the justice system or come through the justice system.
It’s much harder to get elected, but that’s very much what we need. And so there another distortion of the system of justice and another distortion of Justice Capital J is the way that our democracy works in order to choose our leaders and the way that we preserve the way that we think about representation. There is a reason why the parents of murder victims don’t get to pull the switch on the electric chair.
There’s a reason why victims themselves don’t get to choose the punishment. We have to separate these two because we have to have reasonable conceptions of punishment. We have to have reasonable responses to injustice.
And that separation means that we fund and we focus and we design things as almost separate compartments. And I think in a healthy system, these things have to be complementary. They have to be supplementary.
They have to be worked and thought of together and intertwined so that there’s a balance between all those things so that the victims, so that we do care about the victims, whatever form they take, and so that victimization isn’t the end of a person’s life. It’s just one chapter that can be overcome.
Ashley Thornberg
UND professor of philosophy, Dr. Jack Russell Weinstein, we’re visiting today about concepts of justice. And Jack, we’ve been, as is often the case with these discussions, dealing in the abstract and in particular, in this case, in the justice system. But I wonder what you would say to people in thinking about how we think about justice and just a more easy world example of just how can we think about justice and improve our just marriages or ability to parent?
Dr. Jack Russell Weinstein
It is worth stepping back and asking what our relationship with any individual person is like. As parents, we have two jobs. Our job, well, we really have one job.
The irony of parents, the difficulty of being a parent is our job is to teach our children not to need us. It’s the heart. It’s the most heartbreaking aspect.
We, the closest we are to our children is at their moment of birth. And for women who carry children, the closest they are to the child is when the child is in their body. And then every step of the way, that child gets further and further and further away.
Therefore, our two jobs as parents are teacher and caregiver. And we have to balance those two things. And so when we punish our children or when we set rules for our children, the question we have to ask is, are we balancing our role as teacher and are we balancing our role as caregiver?
Are we helping the child make better decisions in the future or make good decisions? And are we rewarding them, caring for them, being affectionate with them? The same thing is true of, let’s say, neighborly relations, right?
The nature of my relationship with my neighbor is to be a partner and also to stay out of it at the same time and to know the difference between those times in which I can offer help or ask for help and those times in which I protect, which I respect the boundaries between two people. So sometimes that takes the form of snowblowing our neighbor’s path or lending them a ladder. And sometimes that takes the role of looking away when the neighbors are having a fight or when they’re having a romantic liaison in the backyard and the fence isn’t tall enough.
And so you turn your head, right? Another relationship we have in life is colleagues. And so, again, the job of colleagues, part of it is to be a partner.
Sometimes it’s a little bit to be a competitor. Sometimes it’s to work in parallel, working at the same time, at the same speed, but on different things. I think the best way to think about justice in a non-abstract way is to look at our individual relationships and ask what role we play in their lives and what role they play in our lives and try to construct behavior that reflects those rules.
And when we do that, we are looking at a much more manageable, much more identifiable method of achieving justice without burying ourselves in the complex abstractions that history has put on our back.
Ashley Thornberg
It’s no easy thing to be a human.
Dr. Jack Russell Weinstein
It is not. But, you know, if if it were easy, everyone would do.
Ashley Thornberg
UND professor of philosophy, Dr. Jack Russell Weinstein, he is also the host of Why? Philosophical Discussions About Everyday Life, which you hear every second Sunday right here on Prairie Public at five o’clock central. Jack, thanks so much for joining us for Philosophical Currents.
Dr. Jack Russell Weinstein
My pleasure, as always. Thank you, Ashley.
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