Manipulating Justice

As any parent of small children will tell you, children have an amazingly acute sense of justice. Even the most fractional disparity in the distribution of the most trivial family good will be met with cries of “That’s not fair!” Of course, over time, parents will also note among children a powerful capacity to conveniently bend notions of justice to self-interest.

A six-year-old’s passion for justice is clearly not disinterested. In the hands of clever human beings, justice becomes an amazingly flexible concept. In fact, as we get older, it comes to look more like a powerful tool for…