Best Living Spokesman for Atheism

[Delicate]

Where did I say the idea that you should strive to do so is wrong? Can you point it out in my post?

Your entire post was about how Dawkins' idea of taking responsibility for your own wrongdoings is, and I quote, "impossible," on the basis that we cannot perfectly pull it off. I'm not going to play semantic games with you there: if you think a thing is impossible, why would you attempt it?

Rather, I think justice is one of those concepts that are all-or-nothing. Just like the relation of "being identical to" is all or nothing, or "being equal to" is all or nothing.

And you're wrong. The entire justice system that we have is predicated on you being wrong. When we lock up a criminal for murder, justice isn't perfectly done, the wrongdoing is not repaired on a one-to-one basis because the victim is still gone, and the family does not have them returned. But we do it anyway because we recognize that some justice has merit, even if it's not all the justice that is required.

You can do something. The fact that you might not be able to do everything is not an argument against Dawkins' point, even though you presented it as though it were.

99 just isn't equal to 100. That's not a fallacy. That's a fact. 

Set aside all the atheist apologetics here and ask yourself this: If someone took $100 from you, and you need to be restituted, what do you deserve? Do you deserve only $99? Or do you deserve the full $100? If someone only gives you $99, do you get what you deserve?

The very idea of justice itself has this self-evident all-or-nothing quality to it.

If someone took $100 from me I would still take the $99 back. Hell, I'd take no money back, if it turned out the thief had spent it all and had no means to pay it back. I'd still expect him to face the law for it, though. Life's not perfect; how is that an argument against Dawkins' point? You think it is: how is that?

At least we can lay out where we agree before arguing over where we disagree. 

If the standard of justice is as I say it is (99 is not equal to 100), then I'm right, it is practically impossible, isn't it? And whether or not you would accept $99 back or not, it's still true that you deserve $100, and anything less would not make you whole, correct?

You seem to raise three different issues in your post:

1) Why attempt justice if it's impossible, you ask. 

For one, we all implicitly assent to perfect justice- whether or not it's achievable, we all believe this is what people deserve and ought to receive. This is a standard we ought to strive to conform to. Second, there are some exceedingly rare individual cases where we can, in fact achieve perfect justice. And third, while perfect justice cannot be achieved, approximate justice allows victims and sufferers to better cope with the injustice, by reducing the extent of the injustice they bear.

2) You say the justice system is predicated on me being wrong. However, the above is perfectly compatible with our justice system. Even when we cannot achieve perfect justice, we try to approximate it for the above reasons. If it's not, where does it contradict the justice system?

3) The argument against Dawkins is like the following:
a) True justice is an all-or-nothing affair (see the reasons I provided above)
b) Simply taking responsibility never achieves true justice
c) Therefore Dawkins leaves us with a hollow, dissatisfying, conception of justice, a poor knock-off of a complete notion of justice whose existence as an ideal we not only affirm, but we desire, and we strive for. But we have no hope of achieving.

Taking responsibility is a poor knock-off.

In your rush to defend Dawkins and rain thunder from the angry atheist pulpit, you clearly haven't properly thought-through your view.

If we care about justice, we ought to prefer perfect justice to imperfect.

Imperfect justice is in some ways no justice at all. If someone steals a thousand dollars from you, and only pays back 500, you can rightly say you haven't been made whole.

If that's the kind of justice you advocate, it's not justice. It's just a lesser form of injustice.

That was easy, it's not often people voluntarily place their neck in the lunette of Hume's guillotine.

Your starry-eyed "Hume works in mysterious ways" is not a refutation of my view.

Perhaps I'm right about justice, and you're not up to the task of admitting that this darned dirty theist has a point?