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In an excellent op-ed in today’s New York Times, Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert points out that our conception of justice relies on two concepts that, as a rule, humans are really bad at judging: 1) that retribution is more moral than preemption and 2) that the response ought to be symmetric in magnitude to the initial act. In other words, if you take my eye, then 1) I have the right to respond, and 2) I don’t have the right to take both of yours. There are two problems, however. First, we easily lose track of who struck first; in fact, we often disagree about what even constitutes a “strike”. As Professor Gilbert points out, I remember the justification for why I hit you a lot better than I remember how hard I hit you. So what appears to you as a first strike (and what you remember as a first strike), appears to me as a logical and justified response to your previous action. Which means that when you hit me back, I start counting from there; because that was the first unprovoked action from my perspective, even though from your perspective it was a justified retaliation. Second, we are exceedingly bad at judging how hard we are hitting other people relative to how hard they hit us. I will tend to overvalue things that belong to me, and undervalue things that belong to you, and vise versa, which makes it difficult to adjudicate “fairness” of response in most circumstances. This is, of course, exacerbated by the fact that we may value the same resource differently. If a soccer player cuts off the left-hand of a concert pianist, does the pianist then get the right to remove the left hand of the soccer player? Or the left foot?
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