What is Justice?
Mosaic Of Truths
What is Justice?
Words that may have one particular definition, may actually mean way more
In a world of whispers and deceit, where shadows dance and lie
We need to have the courage to speak, and be completely honest
A Disposition to express the truth
But what is "truth"?
It's hard trying to get the truth to come to the light
All we know is
Lies
So many lies, untold stories, twisted up stories, or even one-sided stories
Have been keeping us from bringing the truth into the light
We as a community have to create a Mosaic
Not out of, stone, tile, or glass
But out of Truths so that we can shine a light on the dark spots in our history.
If we create a Mosaic out of truths
A painting made from different materials
Except, we replace the materials with truths
Maybe we'll find the answer to bringing the truth into the light
That's Justice!
Reflection
What I wanted my readers to take away from my poem is to consider the relationship between honesty, justice, and the theological question of pain. I have four main sources that my poem was based around, The Republic of Plato, The Excellent Mind, The Problem of Pain and lastly a game that I played called Mosaic. The idea of my poem is to give my readers an idea of what I would consider justice. Bringing the truths out into the light of our country or even bigger, our world, would be justice in my eyes. It's just far too many assumptions, and twisted stories in our world, and I wanted to give my point of view of what I would think justice actually means and looks like.
I want my readers to be able to see how truths play a part in the word justice and how the question "what is justice?" is much more complicated than you think. The book The Republic Of Plato is considered a classic philosophical text authored by Plato around 375 BCE. It's Plato's best-known work. Plato's The Republic has many references and definitions of justice. Something that stood out to me during my first deep dive into the book was the way Plato explores the word justice through many dialogues, particularly in the form of just asking questions. An example of this is when Socrates and Adeimantus is having a discussion about justice. Socrates asks a question, he says, "There is, we say, justice of one man; and there is surely, justice of a whole city too?" Then he continues with "Is a city bigger than one man?" When Adeimantus replies with a yes, Socrates says, "So then, perhaps there would be more justice in the bigger and it would be easier to observe closely." He goes on to tackle that one definition of the word justice by providing examples. Plato gives multiple definitions of these words by just asking questions trying to get someone else's perspective. That explains why I asked questions like, "What is justice", or "What are truths". Plato examined the word justice and I wanted to create something for my readers to think deeply about. We all think we know the definitions of these words, until we're asked.
I also wanted my readers to consider how dishonesty ties into truth and justice and how they relate to one another. My second source is The Excellent Mind by Nathan L King. King touches on intellectual virtues such as, dishonesty, honesty, autonomy, courage, and curiosity and how these virtues play a part in our everyday life. King provides us with an example of dishonesty to support his statement that "Lying is a familiar kind of deception, but its not the only kind. Sometimes, we can bluff: we can intend to deceive either by saying something true but misleading, or by not saying anything at all. Both varieties of bluffing are common in academic settings, especially competitive ones."(The Excellent Mind, Chapter 7 pg 136). The example that King provides is this scene where there's a young man name David who's a freshman in college. The young man was assigned to read Plato's Republic, but instead he reads the CliffsNotes. When asked by his professor about the book, he responds in context of the CliffsNotes, but he ends up not being truthful and honest about reading the book. Instead he takes the dishonest route and proceeds to mislead his professor and classmates into believing he read the book. I agree with King's statement that "we can intend to deceive either by saying something true but misleading, or by not saying anything at all." This particular definition is accurate in my eyes because, I believe we all can be misleading and dishonest by not saying anything at all . We mislead people sometimes to make our actions, arguments, and points seem fairly true or honest. This all relates to justice because, with us bluffing, not purposeful but instinctively, we kind of make lies into truths. What I mean by this is that a lie may be a lie until you mislead someone to make that lie into a truth. I believe this happens way too often, especially in history, and like King said, in "academic settings". If we can unfold or untwist majority of the "truths" that are actually lies, I believe the world would be significantly better. We have to be better. We have to practice King's intellectual virtue of being honest by not being so misleading and turning what started off as a lie, into truths, that's not justice.
Part of understanding truth and justice is examining those ideals as a theological question. The Problem Of Pain was written by C.S Lewis. Lewis explores the existence of pain and suffering in the world from a philosophical and theological perspective. Lewis writes that "If God were good, He would wish to make his creatures perfectly happy, and if God were almighty, he would be able to do what He wished. But the creatures are not happy. Therefore God lacks either goodness, or power or both." (The Problem Of Pain, Chapter 2 pg 16) The point Lewis is trying to make here is that, if God is good and almighty, why is there pain in the world? Why is his creatures unhappy? With his creatures being unhappy does that mean we created the pain in the world. A better question would be: did we as humans create this unjust world? Lewis argues that since humans have free will, it allows us to make both good and bad choices. If I had to make a connection to Lewis's point, I would say that, God gave man free-will so that we could be happy. A point I would like to make is that it's the way we use our free-will that makes us unhappy. This all ties into justice because we tend to do unjust things with our free-will such as being dishonest. If we were to practice more of King's intellectual virtue of honesty, we could bring the truths out of the shadows, and out into the light.
In my poem, I came up with the idea that if our world, community or anyone, decided to create a mosaic out of truths, our world would be a lot different. Think about today's society. Our country's history alone is controversial because of all the twisted assumptions of what went on in the past and is currently happening. Think about if we were able to bring the truth into the light and piece together those lies that foreshadow our country and create a massive image or movement that supports this giant mosaic that we as a country made. To me, that's justice. Like I said before, the world would be significantly better in many different ways. Some of us may not want to build a mosaic though. There's two different types of people, you have the ones who know about the false information and go on to research and educate themselves further on the topic. Then you have other types of people who believe the first piece of information they hear or come across on social media and run with it. You can choose to further educate yourself on history, unjust situations and more, or you can choose not too and just go with whatever your told to do. That's the power of free will. But your intellectual virtue is how important you rank that ability to go out and actually learn more about the world.