The complexity of justice

Wow! Having found myself attending Chuks Okereke's class on climate and justice this term at Oxford, my head is not only swimming, but I'm about to take a jump off the deep end ... pause for awkward silence.

Is it posible to achieve justice in the presence of complexity? And I don't just mean the multifaceted nature of the concept (rather than conception :-) itself, but that when we talk of the implementation of justice within complex systems, it no longer seems ascertainable. This is because not only is justice a complex issue in and of itself, but to which part of the system are we referring when we say we want it to be just and equitable. Justice implies trade-offs and compromise, but with a complex system one never fully has a grasp of the whole picture: of what the possible feedbacks could be, what the knock-on effects are and whether this will actually result in a less just system. In order for there to be justice within a system, that system needs to be defined: this is a political process in itself and loaded with areas for exclusion of relevant stakeholders. Can a system ever be 'just' if at the stage at which it is defined we cannot hope ever to achieve full participation?

We can, of course, make vast improvements in our level of inclusion at the decision-making stage, at being reflexive of our own preconceived notions and ideologies that are framed by our backgrounds (both disciplinary and others), but is this sufficient? On the other hand, throwing our hands up in despair at the complexity of it all is also not particularly helpful and it could be argued that it reinvigorates the inequality f no-one is standing up to it. (This post has now been severely reconfigured in light of Ariella Helfgott's class on system theory and resilience so apologies for the conflation and confusion of ideas :-).

I clearly don't have the answers, but I just wanted to throw it out there as a problematic to which I may later return. It brings up issues of how to deal adequately with uncertainty and complexity- not to ignore them nor to try to minimise or eliminate them, but to incorporate them in our system governance, which includes the loaded notions like justice.

Until then- my head is stuck in another random post so I will return to this question at a later stage!

L
xxx