Crossing the divide: A website about Literature, Art & Philosophy by Venkat Ramanan

Below is my "Question of the Month" response which was published in Philosophy Now , Dec 2015/Jan 2016 ( see subscriber link) (I was awarded a random book for my response.) What’s More Important: Freedom, Justice, Happiness, Truth? The thought foremost in the minds of the Jews fleeing the Third Reich would have been freedom from Nazi clutches, not justice. For them justice must have seemed a distant mirage. What makes justice hard to get is that, as philosopher John Gray points out, it is “an artefact of custom.” So when customs change, justice changes. And happiness here? The term can be applied in the context of someone fleeing oppression only if we stretch the meaning of ‘happiness’ to cover emotions such as relief, comfort, or solace. It is doubtful though if Hitler’s victims would have experienced even pale happiness. ABA's Magna Carta Memorial, Runnymede, UK. (Photo: Andrew Bowden/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 2.0) Some say that truth consists of beliefs

By being too distant and dispassionate could our writers, judges, social theorists and others in the public space be accused of not bestowing requisite warmth and empathy in their actions and pronouncements? Is it in other words proper to apply the above praxis of detachment in all human encounters that call for the use of both judgement and empathy and compassion? T he defendant is one of six accused of not having gone to the aid of several hundred women prisoners locked into a church that was later bombed by the Allies. All defendants were women guards at a Nazi satellite concentration camp near Auschwitz. Photo: Edward Onslow Ford , Justice , partie d'un monument au maharajah de Mysore During a moment in the trial the defendant does not apparently know what she should or could have done differently. She therefore poses that question to the judge asking him what he would have done. The judge replies that there are matters “one could not get drawn into”. By using the