"Don't be fooled by me. Don't be fooled by the face I wear. For I wear a thousand masks,
masks that I am afraid to take off and none of them are me." —Unknown

24 February, 2005 - 5:14 p.m. - Justice
Today i was listening to an old episode of This American Life that had a segment about the Yugoslav War Crimes Trials (it's the 3 January 1997 episode, in case you're curious). At one point, someone asks a mixed group of survivors--who were friends despite their ethnic differences--why they couldn't sit down and write the definitive history of the war. A long silence followed. Ultimately, the response was that they would never agree on what should even be included in such a history, and they would never agree on what acts were criminal and what acts weren't.

Meanwhile, there's this dedicated and truly idealistic group of prosecutors and the like who are determined to bring the supposed war criminals to justice, despite vague, incomplete, and even false testimony. They are, as the segment points out, a group of outsiders (many of whom are American) who just don't understand the culture, history, or politics of the region, and yet they're charged with Bringing Criminals to Justice.

I'm pretty sure i brought this up ages ago, maybe after 9/11, but i have to ask again now: What exactly is justice? Is there some ideal, objective state of justice that we can actually strive toward, or is justice always and absolutely subjective?

And if it's subjective, where do you stop? Do you have to take in the whole of a state's--or, let's bring this down to a more manageable level, a person's--history, environment, culture, psychological state, parentage, etc. into consideration? Do you have to go back, in the case of Yugoslavia, to the day the first human set foot on the land? In the case of crime on a personal level, do you have to examine the childhoods of both victim and perpetrator, and the circumstances that brought them together? And even if you know all this, can you ever really have a reasonably good solution appropriate to all the circumstances?