Hard-Wired Justice

By BJ

Jazz Shaw at TMV flags a study that suggests that a sense of justice is hard-wired into the human brain.

Fairness is more than just a dogma, it’’s an emotion hard-wired in the human brain, claims a new study, which has shown that the brain uses different biological mechanisms for judging a crime and determining its punishment.

The research team led by Owen Jones, a professor of law and biology at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee has found that brain assesses guilt and determines punishment through various neural mechanisms in the brain.

Those decisions involve parts of the brain associated with rational thought and emotions.

“It suggests that ancient and modern criminal justice systems may otherwise be built on a much more primitive, pre-existing machinery for recognizing unfairness to you,” New Scientist quoted Jones as saying.

The major finding seems to be that it is the emotional regions of the brain that drives what we consider to be a fair punishment rather than one's responsibility for the act. What brings that to mind is this story of Iranian justice in the Old Testament mold of an, "eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth", that makes the Iranian justice system the envy of fanatical fundamentalist followers of an old desert god everywhere.

Ameneh Bahrami once enjoyed photography and mountain vistas. Her work for a medical equipment company gave her financial independence. Several men had asked for her hand in marriage, but the hazel-eyed electrical technician had refused them all. "I wanted to get married, but only to the man I really loved," she said.

Four years ago, a spurned suitor poured a bucket of sulfuric acid over her head, leaving her blind and disfigured.

Late last month, an Iranian court ordered that five drops of the same chemical be placed in each of her attacker's eyes, acceding to Bahrami's demand that he be punished according to a principle in Islamic jurisprudence that allows a victim to seek retribution for a crime. The sentence has not yet been carried out.

Clearly this, along with other "enlightened" methods of punishment like the lopping off of hands and heads, are generally frowned upon in most of the civilized world, (the longstanding debate over capital punishment notwithstanding), and are apparently none too popular in Iran itself.

Still, as the story notes, even the opponents of this sentence have been muted in their criticism, because the story of Bahrami pulls pretty hard at our emotional center. As a result, that hard-wired justice system we all have tends to tends towards a pretty harsh punishment for the man who did it to her.

Whether or not it is really justice depends a great deal on how you define the term, and defining it, as with other terms that are emotionally charged, is never easy.

Comments

[ff11]

If you are looking for "justice", it's hard to deny that the sentence is a just one. But just as undeniably, it is inhumane.