David:  The young woman in the audience — as well as John Stossel and some other audience members — had a much clearer sense of reality than Prof. Barber.  In response to her very lucid questions, Barber could do little more than fall back on the empty concept of “justice.”  Whenever I am asked to define “justice” I do so in terms of “the redistribution of violence.”  My own preferences in this regard have been well-stated in one of my favorite films, The Winslow Boy. Towards the end of the movie the hero (the attorney who successfully defended the brother of the heroine) is asked if he had not been moved by the fact that “justice” had been done.  It was the fact that ”right [not justice] had been done,” he said, adding that it is ”easy to do justice; but hard to do right.”

The Best of Butler Shaffer