4) A Model for Understanding Justice: Conclusion

            So there you have it.  If there is some further annexation required of this model, I do not know of it.  If ever I find it, rest assured that I will promptly add to it. 

One final note, before I go.  It is useful to point out that when it comes to judging the justification of a given action, our own intuitions are surprisingly accurate.  Suppose that a man murders another man in cold blood.  We all seem to know of-the-bat that this man is guilty.  Suppose that a baseball player hits a ball which flies into someone’s head and kills them.  Tragic as that may be, we all seem to know inherently that this person is innocent.  Suppose that a man killed an intruder to protect his wife.  Most of us are divided over this: some say he is justified, some are on the fence, some say he is guilty.  What does this mean?  Are we all right?  Clearly the answer to that is no.  He couldn’t be both justified and unjustified – that would be moral absurdity.  So what, then?  Why are our intuitions all over the place when it comes to this situation?

The answer is simple: there is no guarantee that the husband was justified.  Recall the question mentioned near the beginning of this essay through we can pry at his intent: “If the circumstances had been different, would you have protected your wife without killing the man?”  There is every possibility that his answer is “no”; in other words, he would still have killed the man even if it was not necessary to defend his wife.  In such an instances, surely he would be considered arbitrary and unjustified.  If he answered “yes”, then he would be justified, and we have already analyzed several reasons why.

In other words, if intuition is distinctly divided over the justification of a given action, it is probably due to the fact that it could go either way.  It is when that happens that we need to closely scrutinize the situation (here it is done via intent, but such scrutiny might be possible in a number of ways), and make a right judgment about the morality of it.  That way, we neither condemn the innocent nor pardon the guilty.  We, by properly judging the morality of a situation, are better equipped to respond in a way that is itself morally upright.