Judge Yourself, Not Others

“Give yourself judges and administrators to carry out just decisions…” (Deuteronomy, 16:18)

Take note that the command is in the singular. Each of us is personally addressed by “God” to do just that: make fair judgments and carry them out, and pursue with just means the goals of justice so that injustice, oppression, and anguished suffering are eliminated (Levy, 2015).

After doing so well in the Detain / Release assignment, it is fitting that the prompt I got from The Thing From The Future relates to the court system.

  • Arc = A millennium into the future where society has come apart
  • Terrain = Court System
  • Object = An Instrument
  • Mood = Happiness

Justice requires a continuously active process to remedy or prevent injustice. As we have seen in recent years, economic, cultural, religious, educational, and family conditions can impact society’s ability to prevent injustice. These can all lead to biases that impact decisions rendered by those appointed to serve justice and those who work to develop and implement methods to reduce or remove biases found in the court system.

The Bible says that we need to judge ourselves rather than others judging our guilt or innocence. To some extent, AI programs designed today intend to remove the judgement from others based on our actions, family, and economic conditions. As Dunne and Raby (2013) highlight, many of the challenges we face today are unfixable, and the only way to overcome them is by changing our values, beliefs, attitudes, and behaviour (p. 2). As my arc indicated, our society has come apart. We did not or were not willing to change. Instead, we continued to fiddle with the world rather than alter our ideas, biases, and attitudes (Dunne & Raby, 2013, p. 2). However, believing that the idea of truth is a not-too-remote vision which guides and stimulates us in our quest for a better future (Lodge, 1920), we were able to develop an instrument that could remove biases and get closer to the ability to serve justice.

 

References:

Dunne, A., & Raby, F. (2013). Speculative everything: Design, fiction, and social dreaming. The MIT Press.

Levy, S. (2015). The pursuit of justice. T’ruah. Retrieved April 2, 2023, from https://truah.org/resources/the-pursuit-of-justice/