34 sats \ 2 replies \ @gd 1 Mar \ on: Is Justice Bad for Children? mostly_harmless
Disclaimer: I am not a parent, so I certainly don't have the experience to advise on child rearing, or how to implement this best as a parent.
I think what you're describing here makes total sense, in fact— I'd go further and say that you've stumbled on to something that most people in life will pretend is not the truth. The exercise in "punishment" is a waste.
That being said your question is about Justice, and I firmly believe exercising Justice is a waste. Justice is a virtue— it comes down to understanding what Justice is itself.
At the end of last year, I done a bunch of reading on the virtue of Justice for similar reasons you describe above— my understanding of Justice was not virtuous at all and I couldn't see how it could do any good.
My philosophical reading lead me to now have a completely different understanding of what Justice is and it stems from one single premise:
That kind of blew my mind, it's totally different from what I had ever picked up from those around me in the past. It's based on the premise of "he who does wrong is the ultimate victim of his action".
So the virtuous exercise of Justice is to help the wrong-doer from wronging himself and helping him respect himself. The other virtues (Wisdom, Temperance, Courage) can really help with this.
That's my 2 sats. Figuring out how to implement that? That sounds like a job for a loving parent :D
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he who does wrong is the ultimate victim of his action.
I lived with a priest once who said something like this. He even went so far as to omit the line in the Nicene creed that says "to judge the living and the dead." His idea being that wrongdoing already carries with it its just punishment.
On the other hand, there's an old thing written by a guy named Boethius where he makes the case that stopping a person from doing wrong is good for them, so even violence can be justified in such efforts. I may be screwing up what he said--it's been a while since I read it. But my takeaway was that he justified a whole lot of harm with this construction.
Probably, good life is somewhere in between. My experience of parenting so far has been that kids want attention more than anything else and acting out can most often be fixed by focusing on them for a little while.
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