Justice, injustice and truth

What follows is a short extract from an essay of mine which was published earlier this month at The Electric Agora on truth and justice. In this passage, I raise a couple of logical and linguistic points about justice (relating to negation and markedness), as well as noting the asymmetry between the concepts justice and truth (the former being dependent on the latter, but not the latter on the former).


[...] Just as the positive rights implicit in social justice are more controversial and contested than negative rights (like liberty), so the concept of justice is (I would suggest) more problematic than the concept of injustice or of a miscarriage of justice. You could argue about whether a person guilty of a crime, for example, ought to be punished in this way or that or punished at all or even blamed. (There might have been extenuating circumstances.) But there would be no disagreement at all about the wrongness of a miscarriage of justice, where a person innocent of a particular crime was convicted; or with respect to cases of a broadly similar kind but which do not involve the court system (so that the term miscarriage of justice would not apply). With respect to the latter, I am thinking of situations – not hard to find, it must be said – in which a person is disadvantaged or penalized in some significant way for what is generally accepted as honest and exemplary behavior.

Another point that seems interesting to me here pertains to the linguistic concept of markedness. Markedness phenomena crop up in many linguistic contexts, like grammatical gender for example. Feminine nouns and adjectives often derive and take their core meaning from the unmarked masculine form. (A suffix might be added to signify a feminine noun or adjective.) Markedness can also apply to antonyms and negation. But it seems that certain negative forms are more uncontroversial and may be clearer than their positive equivalents. This is slightly odd given that the marked negative form of an expression (like ‘injustice’) is in a real sense dependent on and derives its meaning from the unmarked positive form (‘justice’). How is it then that cases of injustice can be more readily understood and less controversial than questions of justice? It is as though the semantics is pulling in one direction (making ‘injustice’ the primary term) and morphology and syntax in another.

Note also that the two concepts, truth and justice, are not symmetrically related. Truth relates directly to justice. The legal process is designed to uncover the truth of what happened, and perjury is a serious offense. One talks of someone being falsely accused. But justice doesn’t relate directly to questions of truth and falsity. Claims are true or false according entirely to non-justice-related criteria. Justice (or injustice) just doesn’t come into it.