Lawful

"The law isn't justice. It's a very imperfect mechanism. If you press exactly the right buttons and are also lucky, justice may show up in the answer. A mechanism is all the law was ever intended to be." - Phillip Marlowe


I've noticed lately I've been blogging about my life too much. I want to take some blog posts to step back and look at some broader issues in the (first?) world today. I think this is a good idea for two reasons. For one, I seem to care more about my thoughts than wishy-washy feelings and two, I think it is probably more interesting to other people and if this blog can get even one person thinking, I've done my job.

I was talking to a close friend yesterday about a topic I distinctly remembering blogging about before - the law/justice system. We both agreed that the role lawyers played in the course of justice was definitely unfair. In that, a "good/component" lawyer could mean the difference between a person going to jail/being committed of a crime when in reality the outcome should be intrinsic to the deed that the accused committed. However, in many cases, it /seems/ like it could be quite subjective.

I don't want to make big claims here, because in reality, I don't have any statistics or knowledge about how big of a difference having a "good" lawyer makes in terms of perhaps, someone going to prison for life, or what not. I do know, however, that having a sibling in law school who I am very close with has taught me that the law/court system is more than just fancy speeches and big revelations like we are so often led to believe in today's television courtroom dramas. However, just the fact that the outcome of justice depends on something other than the actual event seems enough for this issue to warrant concern.

But that brings me to my next point. A while ago I blogged about this issue, I suggested, drawing inspiration from a sci-fi novel I had read once, that what if we simply built a super-computer AI/software entity who could "judge" us? By this I mean, it would observe our actions and evaluate our actions impartially on a certain scale (lets say 1-10) and then decide the outcome based on the score. It could take into accounts all the parameters of the situation (self-defense etc) probably more "fairly" than humans or a jury ever could (of course we'd program it...somehow). Would this theoretically be a better option?

In my last blog, 3 suggested people would not like this. Because deep down, perhaps humans realize they only liked to be judged by others because they are just as flawed as they are. In a way, machines are perfect. They have the ability to obey rules all the time - even if an algorithm has a sort of "random" factor intrinsic to it...that factor is still /known/ to be there. Also, I used the idea of a machine but I could have just as easily used the idea of an omniscient god, which perhaps, more people would be comfortable with. I have no idea why however, as personally, I don't see how we could ever connect with such a Being - is "love" or any human emotion so powerful that it could bind those who know nothing and those who know everything?

Err...Anyway, I'm sort of digressing. But my point is, that this seems to just be another catch-22 about humanity. We want the law to be as just as possible but yet it also has to conform to our innate randomness/feelings/wishy-washy part of being human or else it just seems so removed and unnatural. As such, we are simply stuck as a society. As the quote at the beginning of the post suggests is the mechanism of the law more important than what really happens or what those laws really are? Is it perhaps right to say that we want to be metallic, soulless robots, but at the same time we also want to feel and remember who we are. How can we move on from this?