Steve77🏴🏴 retweetledi
A Short Note On Social Contracts And Fairness
The Long March to 2029’s result is going to be fuelled by incidents that normal people initially find so repulsive that they cannot quantify them. The logical response most Brits would feel when they read this story is “WTF/this is appalling/surely I’m misunderstanding something here.” When 2029 occurs, the punditry class of the Brexit era are going to look back and try and retroactively pinpoint what led to this. They will assess it incorrectly.
For the Leviathan to work, the state asks citizens to renounce private vengeance in exchange for protection and proportionate justice. When that bargain looks broken, understandably legitimacy erodes. Beyond a sense of genuine disgust the British elite seem to have forgotten that a quintessential British value is FAIRNESS. The Leviathan in the British context should guarantee a sense of fairness. Work hard? Get paid well, more than those who don’t. Follow the law? Protected by the law. And so on.
You can observe so many of the current issues wracking this country as existing downstream of a lack of fairness perception. It can be bad for all of us AS LONG as it’s a fairly distributed level of badness. [This is an issue to be discussed another time]
As is already happening, we will see these incidents become more common. There will be (yet another) fissure created between the state and the population, between the Leviathan’s claim to offer protection and the perceived reality for your average British person. The next developing fissure may be between judges like this and the notion of what the average British person believes justice to be.
This case is yet another that is the antithesis of British fairness and old values. It matters because the sentence appears grotesquely lenient and critically because it exposes a widening gap between the justice system’s internal logic and the public’s basic moral expectation: that rape, coercion, filming and humiliation should carry an unmistakably serious consequence.
To come back to the same point I make repeatedly: by not treating these situations with the utmost seriousness, you are creating the conditions for a national security nightmare. It becomes a breeding ground for demagogues, vigilantism, fear and apathy. Fairness - what we used to call justice I guess - matters immensely.
Daily Mail@DailyMail
Teenage gang who lured schoolgirl, 15, to underpass and laughed as they filmed themselves raping her handed youth rehabilitation orders trib.al/RkAJsUQ
English
