Life is not fair-Get used to it (Bill Gate)
Life is not fair. We have all heard that from someone at some point in our lives. Life is not fair because there is no certainty of what is going to happen in the future. Life awards and punishes people hazardously. Life is like a picture drawn by an unknown painter and one is just a tiny part of it. Pictures can always deceive a person about what their real meaning is. Lie, appearances, contradictions, colors, conformity and people are just decoration in the overall interpretation of the picture. Life is not fair because it does not approach reality in a non painful way. If one believes the contrary then one may be living in a bubble world or one is the luckiest person on earth. If you are one of those who said this sentence at least once in his or her life, then welcome to the real world.
Justice as an abstract notion has been defined as the proper allocation of good attributes such as wealth, power, reward, and respect between different people. In addition to possessing these attributes, the proper punishment must be executed according to what one has done. As Mark Twain mentions people are taught by the dogmas of religion and that there is a God who gives everyone what they deserve. Religions try to proclaim that everything one does is going to be awarded or punished with equity. But all have seen that in real life something like that rarely happens, even though bad boys in Sunday school’s tales always end up having terrible punishments. In Twain’s version, however, Jim in the Story of the Little Bad Boy had a charming life. “He stole his father’s gun…and did not shoot three or four fingers off, he struck his little sister on the temple…he came home drunk…”( 22-23) and nothing bad happened to him. According to the beliefs, religions try to assure children that Jim should have been drowned or died in a horrible way but instead, “he married, got wealthy will all manner of cheating and rascality… and is universally respected” (23). On the contrary, the good little boy, who “always obeyed his parents, no matter how absurd and unreasonable their demands were; learned his book and went to Sabatth school” (48) did not prosper. Once he tried to follow the example of the good little boys, he found himself with various problems.
Tom Sawyer thought up a robbery game and shared it with all his friends. But since “it would be wicked to do it [rob and kill people] on Sunday”(Twain 10), they decided to choose another day. To these naive children, it is only Sunday that they should virtuous and on the other days, they can be as evil as they want. In the same way, the Grangerfords and the Shepherdsons went to church and they “took their guns along, and kept them between their knees or stood them handy against the wall”(Twain 109), ready to kill each other for every second. It is ridiculous that the feud between two families had been on for nearly thirty years while “everybody said it was a good sermon” which was all about brotherly love and free grace. The irony was that just on the second day, so many people were killed during a fight. Not only those truculent civilized Christian, but also benign townspeople like Miss Watson goes against the morality of religion. “Dat’s Miss Watson - she pecks on me all de time, en treats me pooty rough, but she alwuz said she wouldn’t sell me down to Orleans”(Twain 43). Miss Watson never treats Jim as a person and enslaves him like a cattle all the time. Christianity teaches them to love and help each other and slavery obviously runs counter to it. Furthermore, religion can sometimes be used to seize
Savannah Lamb in her term paper, “An Eye for an Eye” explains that death is a godly thing, not something to be done by human hands. Lamb supports her claims by explaining the Death Penalty is an act of barbaric murder, and we teach our children that two wrongs do not make a right. So why do we contradict ourselves by sentencing people to the death penalty? The authors purpose is to suggest a better way to punish the criminal without sentencing the accused to death. The Author writes in a formal tone to the reader.
In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, Huck experiences many situations which require him to use his moral judgment. During the entire adventure, Huck is essentially in charge of the fate of Jim. Huck’s taught beliefs lead him down the wrong path in the beginning, but eventually –until Tom arrives- his newly developed morals guide him. Society believes that slaves should be treated as property, but Huck’s new beliefs tell him that Jim is a person; not property. Though Huck does not realize that his actions are more moral than those of his environment, he chooses to follow his instincts rather than to follow the rules. As shown in The Adventures of Huck Finn, as well as events of my own daily life, I believe that while external environment has a small impact on our beliefs and identities, every individual fully develops their own morals without regard to what their environment taught them.
When I first started playing the episode, Ira Glass, host and producer of This American Life, immediately grabbed my attention with the line, “Sometimes things are not what they seem. Big news, I know. Here’s an interesting example of it.” Ira, with a voice clear and engaging, went on to describe the account of Damien Cave, a reporter for The New York Times, on an airplane. Damien was looking through an in-flight magazine that was using ads for tourists to attract people to various lands that were centers of drug and gang-related violence. The prologue had started with an interview with Damien and captured vivid descriptions of his analysis of how ads are tools of those in power to coerce people into thinking and consuming. “Propaganda is
He argues that the only punishment possibly equivalent to death, the amount of inflicted harm, is death. Death is qualitatively different from any kind of life, so no substitute could be found that would equal death(6). The down side of the retributive system of just can be observed in our modern practices of zero tolerance laws. These laws have placed values of some wrongdoings so high that punishment for relatively minor offenses can see an offender detained for substantially longer than arguably needed to repay the harm they caused. Placing a grater demand on our prison facilities and creates a circle of offense and
We can see that justice is achieved when the punishment for the offender is equal to the crime he/she has committed. Therefore, a social balance is re-established and maintained within society. But, for young offenders these rules are to some extent thrown out the window.
“…I hear the boot of Lucifer, I see his filthy face! And it is my face, and yours… God damns our kind especially, and we will burn, we will burn together” (Miller 1315). As Miller states in The Crucible, justice comes individually. Justice is not determined by the will of society, but by the honesty and leadership of an individual. Several individuals can establish justice within society if they look within themselves for fairness. One must not strive to discover justice within the law or society, but within one’s self.
People argue about the value of a human life almost everyday whether it be divided
When compared to each-other, each of the religion’s approach to justice and forgiveness is remarkably similar. Although the customs and standards may vary widely, and in fact vary even within different sects of each religion, justice and forgiveness operate on largely the same principle: man’s nature is to act against God’s justice, but man is capable of repairing his relationship with God through the process of forgiveness.
Herbert Morris and Jean Hampton both view punishment as important to a healthy society. However, their views on what kind of role does punishment plays in a healthy society are vastly different. Morris believes that when one commits a crime they “owe a debt to the society and the person they wronged” and, therefore the punishment of that person is retributive, and a right for those who committed this wrong (270). Hampton, on the other hand, believes that punishment is a good for those who have strayed in the path of being morally right. Out of the two views presented, I believe that Hampton view is more plausible, and rightly places punishment as a constructive good that is better suited for society than Morris’s view.
Justice is a theme that differs in many different texts, and this also true in the Odyssey and the Bible. Justice in Homeric texts was served to neutralize a situation and bring things back to the way they were, to a time of stability and respect for authority. The bible has usually been interpreted, however, as serving justice on a moral basis, as a way to punish those who did not respect each other or act in God likeness.
In life and in fairytales there are always those that try to harm others or put them down, and fairytales teach children that those who do that do not succeed in the long run. The story of the Pied Piper is a perfect example of this. The people in the city of Hamelin refused to pay the Pied Piper even though they had promised. Because of this the Pied Piper led the children of the village away with his magical music (Young). As one can see this story shows how those that do wrong will be punished for their wrong and cruel acti...
give a definition of justice. At the end of Book II he began a detailed
Injustice and justice balance out. One might even go so far as to say that the two are one and the same, that they are two sides of the same coin. But why are they so important? Why have wars been waged over instances of injustice? Why are the two usually thought of as being separate? Both Euripides' Electra and the King James Version of Matthew suggest that justice and injustice are important and distinct because one brings about salvation, while the other is itself a sort of salvation. Injustice leads to the instance of justice—of salvation. Consequently, injustice and justice may be thought of as two separate and distinct ideas. Salvation is a concern that is dependent upon instances of injustice and justice. In Electra and Matthew, these instances of injustice and justice are acts of murder.
Many individuals wonder what is the meaning of life, and if the life that they are living has some sort of meaning to it. Before determining what the meaning of life is one has to know what the meaning of meaning is. Meaning has to do with how a word represents something or communicates something. Life is not the kind of thing that that can just represent or communicate, and so it doesn’t make sense to ask about the meaning of life, but what if the question to ask about the meaning of life does have an answer? Most things have a clear definition, but is life that simple to have a definition that all individuals will accept?