Is There Justice?

To be honest, I’ve never believed that the world is a fair place.  Bad things happen to good people, and vice versa.  I try to be a good person, but outside a clear conscience, I don’t expect other benefits to accrue.

This has some interesting ramifications in the world of philosophy.  Some people, for example, believe in an afterlife because they feel certain that good must triumph over evil, that justice must prevail, and if it doesn’t in this lifetime, there has to be a later opportunity for redress. Logician, mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell had fun with this.  He said something like, “If you received a case of oranges from your aunt who lives across the sea, and when you opened it you found the ones on the top were rotten, would you think, ‘Well, the ones on the bottom must be ripe and juicy so as to offset the bad ones?'”

Having said this, I’ve recently started to question this basic unfairness thing.  Maybe it’s a coincidence, but there seems to be a string of events in the news that suggest that bad things are starting to happen to bad people.  Above is pictured Frank Nucera, a former New Jersey police chief, who called Donald Trump the “last hope for white people,” and used racial slurs hours after allegedly using excessive force on a handcuffed black man.  He was found guilty in federal court of lying to the FBI, awaits verdicts on other charges, and will certainly be headed off to prison.

Maybe it’s not metaphysical; perhaps it’s much simpler.  People of bad moral character tend to commit crimes.  Some of them get caught, go through the justice system which sometimes works fairly, and get sent away.

If this is true, hold onto your hats; some pretty big (but terrible) people are going to be going down hard.