What is the best method to cultivate civic ethics? Perhaps, there is none to be named as the best. Writing a note, what I am doing is an easy task. Tweeting and trolling require a few seconds, for heroic journalism. Social media is democratic in many sense, but it is also an space of vitriolical and sensational journalism, which is used, abused, and misused, sometimes, for expressing rage and dissatisfaction. A fine gentleman once remarked, "Every popular thing is not necessarily just or good". Justice is not a taste to appreciate. It's the highest possible principle to adjudge an action or conduct of a person in any given situation. Justice is a moral virtue for many theologians, and a political virtue for many political scientists. Justice is rhetorical in its contours, as claimed by post modernists and critical legal thinkers, justice is male as claimed by feminists across the globe. Justice is a social virtue, expressed by socialists and Gandhian thinkers. Justice is found in conduct, what many realist jurists proclaim. Justice is all about harmonisation of interests, if we believe upon the social utilitarians like Roscoe Pound or Ihering. Justice is to give what one deserves, is understood in sense of merit and desert in that direction Aristotelian argument moves. Justice is fairness, be it just distribution or correction, if we rely upon Aristotle or a modern thinker like John Rawls. Justice is to leave alone, if Robert Nozick or Milton Friedman is accepted in his totality. Justice is to prefer convention over universal postulate or transcendental dimension of ethics? The famous dialogue is found in the Republic crafted by Plato. Justice is nothing but the elimination of injustices, if we accept the premise of counter liberal culture, propagated by Amartya Sen, Martha Nussabaum, Adam Smith, Condorcet, Marry Wollstonecraft, etc.
Amidst so many perspectives of justice, where does this "encounter sentiment' fit in? How do we know if arrested person is guilty? There was a culture in common law system, originated in 1542 by Henry VIII, known as the 'Bill of Attainder". Through which, people were convicted in public, or at assembly through votes by legislatures, without proceeding by any due trial. Fenwick was the last person beheaded on January 28, 1697 through the Act of Attainder, since then it was never practiced. The established principles of justice is not considered to be democratic in its ethics. Roman thinker Cicero wrote, "If the principles of justice were founded on the decrees of peoples...,then justice would sanction robbery, adultery, and forgery of wills, in case these acts were approved by the votes or decrees of the populace" (De Legibus). In that sense, writing law on street, creating precedents through hard cases, is a problematical approach towards criminal and penal jurisprudence. As someone rightly said, "hard cases make a bad law". Sentimentality in the process of justice administration must be avoided. For Indian Legal system is awaiting structural reforms, so as to assuage public reason, and to cultivate ethics. Which is, in fact, a desired goal towards Constitutional Morality.
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