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You know, I've long had a problem with Plato's notion of justice. I couldn't see how justice had anything to do with his long discourse on the ideal society as he saw it - which was, frankly, a beehive with everyone assigned their place and rather mindlessly sticking to it.
But my mind works in odd ways. I was thinking about the word justice last night and wondered if maybe it was a problem of translation. I wondered what the word Plato used was and how it might have meant something different from what later translators thought. Not at all unusual.
Not knowing the Greek roots, I considered the Latin. Which brought to mind the old phrase "jus primus noctus", the right of the first night. Hardly a phrase to make a modern person think of justice, but the root is there. And it doesn't refer to justice as we think of it - in legalistic terms of righting wrongs. Rather,it means right as in proper. This shed a new light on the whole matter.
Justice, in this view, means doing what is right in the first place. And surely a society which strives to do the right and proper thing in the first place will in the end provide what we currently think of as justice.
Thus does the sexual predation of nobles bring me to Utopia.
But my mind works in odd ways. I was thinking about the word justice last night and wondered if maybe it was a problem of translation. I wondered what the word Plato used was and how it might have meant something different from what later translators thought. Not at all unusual.
Not knowing the Greek roots, I considered the Latin. Which brought to mind the old phrase "jus primus noctus", the right of the first night. Hardly a phrase to make a modern person think of justice, but the root is there. And it doesn't refer to justice as we think of it - in legalistic terms of righting wrongs. Rather,it means right as in proper. This shed a new light on the whole matter.
Justice, in this view, means doing what is right in the first place. And surely a society which strives to do the right and proper thing in the first place will in the end provide what we currently think of as justice.
Thus does the sexual predation of nobles bring me to Utopia.
