Defend the view that say
justice is vague in itself not just to us and outline how that threatens
objective morality
The claim that justice is vague
in itself—not merely vague to us—takes aim at a key assumption behind
objective morality. That is the assumption that moral truths exist in a clear,
determinate way independent of human interpretation. If justice itself lacks
sharp boundaries, then the idea of a fully objective moral order starts to
wobble.
Start
with the distinction. Many philosophers, like Aristotle, assumed that concepts
such as justice have a real structure, even if humans struggle to grasp it. On
that view, vagueness is not down to justice itself but down to our knowledge.
One fear is that if fuzziness belongs to justice itself – is part of
what it is – then justice is hardly that great. It is less important than we
think, or if it has this harmful lack of clarity. Plus we will worsen those
problems when we try to be just for we are corrupt beings working with a
faulty tool.
Interestingly, if objective morality, if justice is blurry
in itself then how blurry is it? Does it depend on the situation? If there is
too much fog then it is near-useless.
The claim that morality is a set
of clear exceptionless truths becomes morality is a set of blurry
exceptionless truths that lack importance. The person who is very intensely
committed to justice is thus an unjust fundamentalist.
Imagine if
justice is morally binary. It will be a bare yes or no. Many believe that it
is like that. If justice were morally binary, that would mean every action or
situation is, at its core, either just or unjust—full stop. No grey areas, no
ambiguity, just a moral fact of the matter waiting to be discovered.
That only permits us to say that an action should or should not have been
done. It does not necessarily demand rewards and punishments.
In one
sense a binary morality may be clear, but as regards the more important thing,
“Do I reward or punish x?” it gives no direction at all. It hardly matters if
we think morality is fuzzy if that is the alternative we want.
Binary
morality might give a yes or no in very fuzzy affairs. A yes is a yes and a no
is no even when there is nothing but confusion. A yes does not need clarity to
be a yes and a no does not need clarity to be a no. The new issue is that if
you think it is a no when one is about to rob a bank, what then if you realise
it is a very complex situation? You can only guess.
Morality if it is to be relevant to us must be in line with our psychology. Weak psychological egoism means we act partly for we expect – even if wrongly – a reward. But subconsciously this is strong. Underneath, our motive “I want to reward myself by increasing my expectation of a reward” is present and behind what we do. It is true that a morality must call us to the ideal even if we are never perfect. But that call is a lie, it is insincere if we are built to think of ourselves - as if we partly feed the starving baby for we want something for ourselves as if we are that important!
FINALLY
Morality must be action-guiding to count as meaningful
Inherent
vagueness prevents decisive guidance
Therefore, vague moral realism
collapses into practical uselessness
If justice is vague in itself,
then there is no fact of the matter in borderline cases - or if there is the
fact is too weak to value much
Therefore, moral truth is incomplete
Therefore, “objective morality” is structurally deficient, not just hard to
access